Enabling Change and Compliance for Collaborative Processes
Final Report Abstract
Collaborations between different business partners have gained tremendous interest during the last years. An example are virtual factories, where suppliers, producers and customers collaborate in order to produce, offer and consume goods that they would not be able to manage on their own. The core of the collaboration are the business processes of the partners, e.g., the process that describes, manages and executes the production of a certain component, as well as the interactions between these partner-specific internal processes. The internal processes, the interfaces to the other partners, and the interactions between the partners form so called process choreographies. The latter might become very complex and crave for (dynamic) adaptations due to various reasons (e.g., changes of legal regulations or emergence of new competitors in the market). In order to properly react to such changes in the environment one or several partners might have to adapt their internal processes. These internal adaptations might be local, but may also have effects on the interactions with the partners and transitively on their internal process as well. This requires the determination of change effects on the choreography and the subsequent propagation to other partners. Manually checking and determining the effects would be by far too time-consuming and error-prone, specifically if additional rules and requirements have to be respected for compliance reasons. Hence, an automatic solution or at least proper user guidance is required. The goal of the C3Pro project was to offer comprehensive system-based support for change propagation in process choreographies, while respecting internal and external rules at the same time. The core of the developed framework is the change propagation process, i.e., the process of defining, predicting, checking, negotiating, and propagating changes in process choreographies. As discussed in the context of the project results, this process comprises different phases that might become quite complex. As one significant reason, in a fully distributed setting, the details on the internal partner processes are not visible to the other partners due to confidentiality reasons. Moreover, respecting requirements and rules, which are additionally imposed on the choreography, have to be considered as well, i.e., it had to be analysed how changes affect the compliance of the choreography with local and global rules. The most important results of the project are a comprehensive change framework for process choreographies, techniques for the prediction of change effects and their negotiation between the partners, techniques for checking and ensuring compliance of process choreographies in the context of process changes, and comprehensive prototypical implementations. The results we achieved in the project will significantly foster the application and implementation of process choreographies in key domains (e.g., Industy 4.0 and e-health).
Publications
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(2013). On enabling compliance of cross-organizational business processes. Proceedings 11th Int’l Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2013), Beijing, China, pp. 146–154
David Knuplesch, Manfred Reichert, Walid Fdhila, and Stefanie Rinderle-Ma
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(2013). Visual modeling of business process compliance rules with the support of multiple perspectives. Proceedings 32th Int’l Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2013), Hong-Kong, pp. 106–120
David Knuplesch, Manfred Reichert, Linh Thao Ly, Akhil Kumar, and Stefanie Rinderle-Ma
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(2014). Memetic algorithms for mining change logs in process choreographies. Proceedings 12th Int’l Conference on Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2014), Paris, pp. 47–62
Walid Fdhila, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, and Conrad Indiono
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(2015). Change propagation analysis and prediction in process choreographies. Int’l Journal Cooperative Information Systems, 24(3)
Walid Fdhila, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, and Conrad Indiono
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(2015). Dealing with change in process choreographies: design and implementation of propagation algorithms. Information Systems, 49:1–24
Walid Fdhila, Conrad Indiono, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, and Manfred Reichert
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(2015). Detecting the effects of changes on the compliance of cross-organizational business processes. Proceedings 34th Int’l Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2015), Stockholm, October 2015, pp. 94–107
David Knuplesch, Walid Fdhila, Manfred Reichert, and Stefanie Rinderle-Ma
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(2015). Visually monitoring multiple perspectives of business process compliance. Proceedings 13th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2015), Innsbruck, Austria, pp. 263–279
David Knuplesch, Manfred Reichert, and Akhil Kumar
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t (2015). Compliance monitoring in business processes: functionalities, application, and tool support. Information Systems, 54:209–234
Linh Thao Ly, Fabrizio Maria Maggi, Marco Montali, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, and Wil van der Aalst
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(2016). A visual language for modeling multiple perspectives of business process compliance rules. Software & Systems Modeling, Springer
David Knuplesch and Manfred Reichert
