A version management of business process models in BPMS

Abstract

BPM system manages increasing number of business processes and the necessity of managing processes during whole process lifecycle from process modeling to process archiving has been emerged. Despite of wide use of the BPM system and the maturing of its technology, the main focus has been mainly on correctly executing process models, and convenient modeling of business processes has not been considered. In this paper, a new method of versioning business processes is developed in order to provide users with an easy modeling interface. Version management of a process enables a history of the process model to be recorded systematically. In our method, an initial version and changes are stored for each process model, and any version can be reconstructed using them. We expect that our method enhances the convenience of process modeling in an environment of huge number of business processes, and thereby assists the process designer. In order to verify the effectiveness of our method, a prototype system is presented in this paper. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.