Business Process Models - Change Management

In recent years, the role of process models in the development of enterprise software systems has increased continuously. Today, process models are used at different levels in the development process. For instance, in Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), high-level business process models become input for the development of IT systems, and in running IT systems executable process models describe choreographies of Web Services. A key driver behind this development is the necessity for a closer alignment of business and IT requirements, to reduce the reaction times in software development to frequent changes in competitive markets.Typically in these scenarios, process models are developed, maintained, and transformed in a team environment by several stakeholders that are often from different business units, resulting in different versions. To obtain integrated process models comprising the changes applied to different versions, the versions need to be consolidated by means of model change management. Change management for process models can be compared to widely used concurrent versioning systems (CVS) and consists of the following major activities: matching of process models, detection of differences, computation of dependencies and conflicts between differences, and merging of process models.Although in general model-driven development (MDD) is accepted as a well-established development approach, there are still some shortcomings that let developers decide against MDD and for more traditional development paradigms. These shortcomings comprise a lack of fully integrated and fully featured development environments for MDD, such as a comprehensive support for model change management.In this thesis, we present a framework for process model change management. The framework is based on an intermediate representation for process models that serves as an abstraction of specific process modeling languages and focuses on common syntactic and semantic core concepts for the modeling of workflow in process models. Based on the intermediate representation, we match process models in versioning scenarios and compute differences between process models generically. Further, we consider the analysis of dependencies between differences and show how conflicts between differences can be computed by taking into account the semantics of the modeling language.As proof-of concept, we have implemented major parts of this framework in terms of a prototype. The detection of differences and dependencies contributed also to the Compare & Merge framework for the IBM WebSphere Business Modeler V 7.0 [1] (WBM), which was released as a product in fall 2009.