Pattern-based Business Process Change Management in Dynamic Business Environment

Abstract

This paper presents a new approach to managing dynamic business process changes based on business process change patterns. We identify and categorize business process change patterns that occur recurrently in a dynamic business environment. Several issues regarding management of process versions are discussed, and a pattern-based version management method for handling process changes more flexibly is explained in detail. We propose a mechanism for abstract process execution with run-time encapsulation of a business process, which can maximize the flexibility of process execution using multiple process versions. In addition, we propose a concept of process promotion and demotion that can dynamically choose an actual version of the process at run-time. With our pattern-based process change management and versioning approach, it is expected that the flexibility and efficiency of BPM systems can be enhanced significantly.