Towards Schema Evolution in Object-aware Process Management Systems

Enterprises want to improve the lifecycle support for their businesses processes by modeling, enacting and monitoring them based on process management systems (PrMS). Since business processes tend to change over time, process evolution support is needed. While process evolution is well understood in traditional activity-centric PrMS, it has been neglected in object-aware PrMS so far. Due to the tight integration of processes and data, in particular, changes of the data and process schemes must be handled in an integrated way; i.e., the evolution of the data schema might affect the process schema and vice versa. This paper presents our overall vision on the controlled evolution of object-aware processes. Further, it discusses fundamental
requirements for enabling the evolution of object-aware process schemas in PHILharmonicFlows, a framework targeting at comprehensive support of object-aware processes.