Resolving business process interference via dynamic reconfiguration

Abstract

For business processes supported by service-oriented information systems, concurrent execution of business processes still may yield undesired business outcomes as a result of process interference. For instance, concurrent processes may partially depend on a semantically identical process variable, causing inconsistencies during process execution. Current design-time verification of service-based processes is not always sufficient to identify these issues. To identify and resolve potentially erroneous situations, run-time handling of interference is required. In this paper, dependency scopes are defined to represent the dependencies between processes and data sources. In addition, intervention patterns are developed to repair inconsistencies using dynamic reconfiguration during execution of the pro-cess. These concepts are implemented on top of a BPMS platform and tested on a real case study, based on the implementation of a Dutch Law in e-Government. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.