Evolutionary Development of Business Process Centered Architectures using Component Technologies

The process centered paradigm changed the way of today’s business organizations. Both the organizational structure and the IT-infrastructure are effected by this paradigm shift. For companies, competitiveness means meeting the continuously changing business requirements, concerning business environments and workflows . Structural modifications caused by continuously changing business processes, and ad-hoc-modifications triggered by spontaneous events provoke adaptability problems: in all these cases, the software system must be adapted accordingly in order to be consistent with the modified business process. Because of the fact, that that adaptation is costly, time consuming, alternatives paradigms have to be considered. In this paper, we therefore propose to use an evolutionary strategy for the development of business process based applications. In our approach, each modification request caused by a change of the business process implies an evolution step in the architecture of the workflow based applications. In this paper we present EVA , a strategy for forming such evolvable architectures for communication and information infrastructure referred to as EVA . 1 The initial models for EVA are business process models as a basis for modeling system architectures. We use Petri nets for representing the dynamic characteristics of the business processes. The evolution concept on the software architectural level is covered by the application of component strategies. In this paper we will present a concept for the design of evolution in workflow components (Padberg et al., 1999) and explain the composition of these components.