Relationship-Preserving Change Propagation in Process Ecosystems

As process-orientation continues to be broadly adopted – evidenced by the increasing number of large business process repositories, managing changes in such complex repositories becomes a growing issue. A critical aspect in evolving business processes is change propagation: given a set of primary changes made to a process in a repository, what additional changes are needed to maintain consistency of relationships between various processes in the repository. In this paper, we view a collection of interrelated processes as an ecosystem in which inter-process relationships are formally defined through their annotated semantic effects. We also argue that change propagation is in fact the process of restoring consistency-equilibrium of a process ecosystem. In addition, the underlying change propagation mechanism of our framework is leveraged upon the well-known Constraint Satisfaction Problem (CSP) technology. Our initial experimental results indicate the efficiency of our approach in propagating changes within medium-sized process repositories.