Multiple Evolutions of Business Process in Dynamic Environment

The process-aware information systems run in dynamic environments, so it must support changes at runtime. The changes of process model may result in process instances migrating to the modified process model, which is prone to introduce executing conflicts in the migrated process instances. It is difficult to determine the migrating condition of different process instances due to multi-paths existing in the process model. In this paper, on the one hand an efficient approach based on a novel correctness criterion for process evolution is proposed, which can determine the migrating strategies of process instances with diverse of routing structures and running states automatically, and ensure the most migrated process instances executing correctly without rollback tasks in them. It is based on the concept of point of change, and an algorism to find out these points is developed. On the other hand, the problem of how to migrate a process instance among many variants of process schemas is discussed. The algorism of process evolution based on the correctness criterion is also developed. The results in this paper are suitable for realizing an adaptable process middleware.