Dynamically switching execution context in data-centric BPM approaches

Abstract

In contemporary business process management software, the context in which a process is executed is largely static. While the execution of the process itself may be flexible, on-the-fly changes to the context, i.e., physical or logical surroundings, are either limited or impossible. This paper presents concepts for enabling context switching at runtime for the object-aware process management paradigm. Such context switches are enabled at various granularity levels, such as shifting entire process instances to different systems, or migrating sub-processes between different parent processes. We further contribute the algorithms employed in our proof-of-concept implementation and discuss use cases in which context switching capabilities can be utilized. Implementing these advanced concepts helps showcase the maturity of data-centric BPM.