Flexibility of collaborative processes using versions and adaptation patterns

Abstract

Process aware Information Systems (PaIS) have an ever-increasing importance in Enterprise Information Systems for supporting both their intra and inter-organizational processes. However PaIS still have important issues to address, including flexibility of inter-organizational (i.e., collaborative) processes before their definitive acceptance and their use in companies. This paper addresses this issue advocating (i) the modelling of collaborative processes as BPMN collaboration, (ii) the use of the version notion to deal with collaborative process flexibility and to make process instance migration easier, and (iii) the introduction of 6 new adaptation patterns which are highlevel operations for collaborative process schema update.

Adaptation and Evolution Frameworks for Service Based Inter-Organizational Workflows

“…The major part of them have been proposed in a context of service composition and allow horizontal adaptation which is considered as an evolution aspect of process models. Specifically, other aspects of evolution relative to the versioning of process models are used in (Kim et al, 2007;Ben said et al, 2015;Chen & Liu, 2012) and in (Döhring et al, 2011) relative to patterns extension. Regarding the reuse aspects, the proposed approaches are limited to the reuse of services and don't focus on the reuse of the process models themselves.…”

“…These approaches as the previous ones focus on service composition (mainly orchestration) where services are viewed as "black boxes". Some other approaches like (Ben said et al, 2015;Chen et Liu, 2012;Grefen et al, 2014;Fdhila et al, 2015) focus on flexibility of service choreographies mainly aspects of evolution; however, they don't consider the notion of expanding cooperation or reusing process models to define more complex ones.…”

“…The authors of (Weber et al, 2008) describe a set of adaptation patterns and adaptation features to support changes in PAIS (Process-aware information systems); their approach is based on different techniques (multiple choices, ad-hoc modeling, late-modeling), operates horizontal adaptations and allows the reuse of change scenarios via a specific feature called "Change reuse feature". The work of (Ben said et al, 2015) addresses the issue of flexibility applied on collaborative BPMN processes; it describes adaptation patterns for collaborative process schema update and uses the notion of version to deal with collaborative process flexibility and to make easier, the process instance migration.…”

“…In the literature, many approaches dealing with dynamic composition of services have been proposed (Casati & Shan, 2001;Mehandjiev et al, 2006;Pedraza, 2009;Boukadi, 2009;Barba et al, 2013;Esper, 2010). Also, the question of WF flexibility has been clearly addressed, through several works such as (Muller et al, 2004;Kumar & Yao, 2009;Pesic et al, 2007;Minor et al, 2010;Charfi et al, 2009); Döhring et al, 2011;Ben said et al, 2015) which provide different approaches and mechanisms for adaptation, evolution and reuse of process models, particularly specified as an orchestration or choreography of services.…”