Automatic Detection of Business Process Interference

Today’s organizations are characterized by long-running distributed business processes, which involve different stakeholders and share common resources. One of the main challenges posed in such a highly distributed setting comes from the interference between different processes that are running in parallel. During execution of a business process, a data modification caused by some external process may lead to erroneous and undesirable business outcomes. In order to address this problem, we propose to annotate business processes with dependency scopes, which cover critical sections of the process. Erroneous execution can be prevented by executing intervention processes, which are triggered at runtime. However, for complex processes with a large number of activities and many interactions with the environment, the manual specification of the appropriate critical sections can be particularly time-consuming and error-prone. To overcome this limitation, we present an algorithm for automating the discovery of critical sections. The proposed approach is applied on a real case-study of a BP from the Dutch e-Government.