Contingency management for event-driven business processes

Abstract

In the past two decades, business process research has focused on process flexibility to facilitate the operation of business processes in an open and dynamic environment. This is important to ensure that processes accurately reflect and handle changes occurring in the real-world. While substantial existing work has investigated changes in business processes, the contingency management of running processes did not receive sufficient attention, mainly because events are considered to be immutable. Yet high-level business events have been shown to be subject to changes. To be able to capture such changes, business events have to be considered as bitemporal, where the occurrence (scheduled) time and detection time of events are differentiated. Modifying an event’s content may result in a contingency that has to be handled appropriately. For instance, the scheduled time of a planned event in a process may change, which has an impact on subsequent events. In this work, we present an approach to capture bitemporal mutable events in business processes, assess the scope of changes and provide an approach for specifying contingency plans.