Facilitating Cloud Process Family Co-evolution by Reusable Process Plug-in: An Open-source Prototype

Abstract

In a business cloud environment, a reference business process model needs to be customized in order to meet the individualized requirements of each organization. Consequently, a reference process model is generally evolved to a couple of process variants, known as a process family. Currently, there exist some approaches and tools that can efficiently configure a reference process model. However, a key issue is how to manage co-evolution appropriately within a family of process models if the base process model of a process family is changed. Contemporary process management tools do not adequately support the management of such co-evolution. Each process variant in the process family has to be changed as a separate process model which often leads to redundancies and inefficiencies. In this article, we propose a novel approach for managing co-evolution of process families based on an aspect-oriented approach. Change options on base process model are abstracted and extracted as a pluggable component, which can be selectively reused for all members, and consequently, guides the co-evolution for the whole process family. In particular, the control-flow and data-flow relations between process extension and a member of process families can be built by leveraging process extensibility patterns. The correctness of our extension approach is proved based on graph theory. The whole approach in this article have been implemented as a working open-source prototype and tested against a real case study from the city logistic distribution domain as well as real data set from SAP reference models.