On the Controlled Evolution of Process Choreographies.

Process–aware information systems have to be frequently adapted due to business process changes. One important challenge not adequately addressed so far concerns the evolution of process choreographies, i.e., the change of interactions between partner processes in a cross-organizational setting. If respective modifications are applied in an uncontrolled manner, inconsistencies or errors might occur in the sequel. In particular, modifications of private processes performed by a single party may affect the implementation of the private processes of partners as well. In this paper we present a formal framework that allows process engineers to detect how changes of private processes may affect related public views and - if so - how they can be propagated to the public and private processes of partners. In particular, we exploit the semantics of the applied changes in order to automatically determine the adaptations necessary for the partner processes. Altogether our framework provides an important contribution towards the realisation of adaptive, cross-organizational processes.