Dealing with Business Process Evolution using Versions

Abstract

Competition in which enterprises and organizations are involved nowadays imposes them to often make evolve their business processes in order to meet, as quickly as possible, new business or production requirements. This paper proposes to adopt a version-based approach to support these dynamic changes of business processes. This approach permits to keep chronological business process changes: it is then possible to allow several instances of a same business process to own different schemas, each one representing a possible schema for the considered business process. Consequently, this approach is very suitable to deal with long-term business process evolution: it does not necessarily impose the adaptation and migration of running instances of business processes to a new business process schema. The paper contribution is threefold. First, it defines a meta-model for designing versions of business processes considering the three dimensions of business processes: the informational, organizational and process dimensions. Then, it introduces a taxonomy of operations for business process version management. Finally, it proposes to formalize and visualize modeled versions of business processes using a Petri net-based formalism, namely Petri net with Objects.