Version Management in the Business Process Change Context

Abstract

The current business endures a fast changing environment, which drives organisations to continuously adapt their business processes to new conditions. In this background, the workflow version control plays an important role for the change management of business processes. To better handle the versions of evolving workflow process definitions, a new versioning method is introduced in this paper. To capture the dynamics of the workflow evolvement, we propose a novel version preserving directed graph model to represent the run time evolvement of a workflow process, and devise a series of modification operations to characterise workflow updating on the fly. The extraction of workflow versions from a version preserving graph is also discussed with two different extraction strategies. Particularly, our method allows the execution of multiple workflow instances of different versions within a single graph, and supports the evolvements initiated by temporary changes.