Change Propagation and Conflict Resolution for the Co-evolution of Business Processes

In large organizations multiple stakeholders may modify the same business process. This paper addresses the problem when stakeholders perform changes on process views which become inconsistent with the business process and other views. Related work addressing this problem is based on execution trace analysis which is performed in a post-analysis phase and can be complex when dealing with large business process models. In this paper we propose a design-based approach that can efficiently check consistency criteria and propagate changes on-the-fly from a process view to its reference process and related process views. The technique is based on consistent specialization of business processes and supports the control flow aspect of processes. Consistency checks can be performed during the design time by checking simple rules which support an efficient change propagation between views and reference process. Keywords: Business process evolution; process views; process change propagation; process consistency