Dynamic Reconfiguration of Business Processes

Abstract

Organisations require that their business processes reflect their evolving practices by maintaining compliance with their policies, strategies and regulations. Designing workflows which satisfy these requirements is complex and error-prone. Business process reconfiguration is even more challenging as not only a new workflow must be devised but also an understanding of how the transition between the old and new workflow must be managed. Transition requirements can include both domain independent, such as delayed and immediate change, or user-defined domain specific requirements. In this paper we present a fully automated technique which uses control synthesis to not only produce correct-by-construction workflows from business process requirements but also to compute a reconfiguration process that guarantees the evolution from an old workflow to a new one while satisfying any user-defined transition requirements. The approach is validated using three examples from the BPM Academic Initiative described as Dynamic Condition Response Graphs which we reconfigured for a variety of transitions requirements.