Change Propagation in Collaborative Processes Scenarios

Process flexibility and change constitute major challenges for process-aware information systems. This does not only hold for centralized process scenarios, but also for collaborative ones involving multiple distributed and autonomous partners. If one partner adapts its private process, the applied change might affect the processes of the other partners as well. Hence the change must be propagated to concerned partners in a transitive way. A fundamental challenge is then to find ways of propagating the changes in a decentralized manner. Existing approaches dealing with changes of collaborative processes are limited with respect to the change operations considered and their dependency on certain process specification languages. By contrast, this paper presents a generic change propagation approach based on the Refined Process Structure Tree. Our approach is applicable independently of a particular process specification language. Further, it considers a comprehensive set of change patterns. Finally, it is shown that the provided change propagation algorithms preserve structural dependencies for any change pattern.