Version management for business process schema evolution

Highlights

• A versioning approach to specify process schema evolutions and versions in version space.

• Analysis on process evolution dependency and conflicts.

• A version preserving graph model to capture and update process changes in schema space.

• Algorithms to dynamically retrieve the process schema of any version from the VPG.

• Implement a proof-of-concept prototype.

Abstract

The current business environment changes rapidly, dictated by user requirements and market opportunities. Organisations are therefore driven to continuously adapt their business processes to new conditions. Thus, management of business process schema evolution, particularly process version control, is in great demand to capture the dynamics of business process schema changes. This paper aims to facilitate version control for business process schema evolution, with an emphasis on version compatibility, co-existence of multiple versions and dynamic version shifts. A multi-level versioning approach is established to specify dependency between business process schema evolutions, and a novel version preserving graph model is proposed to record business process schema evolutions. A set of business process schema updating operations is devised to support the entire set of process change patterns. By maintaining sufficient and necessary schema and version information, our approach provides comprehensive support for navigating process instance executions of different and changing versions, and deriving the process schema of a certain version. A prototype is also implemented for the proof-of-concept purpose.

Introduction

In the current business globalisation setting, varying market opportunities have been described as “change has become the only certainty” [1]. In such a turbulent environment, organisations have to adapt their business processes to emerging opportunities and changes continuously [2], [3], in order to survive and thrive. Driven by this urgent de-mand, organisations are seeking new technologies to help manage their dynamic, expanding and changing business processes [4], [5].

Technically, these requirements call for support on process schema evolution, process instance updating, and version control, inter alia. In particular, the capability for updating running process instances to the latest schema version, and modifying the process schema without suspending running instances is highly sought after [6]. In practice, this requirement is further complicated by temporary and concurrent process schema evolutions, since they result in many business process schema versions and their business process instances. As such, innovative version management solutions are in demand to harmonise the co-existence of business processes and instances belonging to different versions.

In our previous work [7], we tackled the handover of running instances from an old process schema to a new schema, i.e., between only two process schema versions, with other colleagues. In this paper we concentrate on management of multiple process schema versions and version shifts. A multi-level evolution diagram is proposed to specify process schema evolutions and their dependencies, while a version preserving graph is defined to record process schema evolutions. This approach allows dynamic process schema evolutions and co-existence of diverse process schema versions, and supports the entire set of classical process change patterns [8], [9]. Particularly, our approach contributes to the current process version management by:

• Proposing a process versioning approach to specify the process schema evolutions and versions in the version space.

• Establishing a novel version preserving graph (VPG) model to capture sufficient and necessary process schema evolution information and update the process schema on the fly, in the schema space.

• Defining a set of updating operations to support dynamic process schema evolutions following various process change patterns.

• Supporting extracting process schemas of different versions and navigating process instances of changing process schema versions in a dynamic manner.

• Implementing a proof-of-concept prototype.

The remainder of this paper is organised as follows: Section 2 addresses the version issues in business process schema evolutions with a motivating example, and analyses the requirements for process schema version management with a study of process schema evolution strategies and patterns. Section 3 defines the notion of process schema and introduces a multi-level versioning approach to specify the dependency between process schema evolution and process schema versions. Section 4 proposes a version preserving graph (VPG) model, and explains how to record process schema changes in a version preserving graph with a set of process schema updating operations. Section 5 discusses process instance navigation and process schema retrieval with the VPG model, and introduces the implemented prototype. Section 6 lists the work related to business process change management, and discusses the advantages and limitations of our approach. Conclusion remarks and future work are in Section 7.

The reported work in this paper is based on our previous research on process schema evolutions [10], with significant extensions on process schema version designation, process schema evolution analysis, supports to classical process change patterns, model justification and prototype implementation.