C3Pro: Change and Compliance in Collaborative Processes

The CPro project addresses the change and compliance of collaborative (i.e., inter-organizational) business processes at both design time and runtime. Similar to intra-organizational business processes, consistency and correctness of collaborative processes are of central interest. Additionally, the propagation of process changes to already running process instances and over organizational boundaries constitutes a major challenge in this scenario. CPro further elaborates on how to model, integrate, and verify compliance rules imposed on collaborative business processes to ensure business process compliance with respect to the privacy and autonomy of the involved business partners. The results on flexibility and compliance of collaborative business processes are integrated into a comprehensive approach that enables changes of collaborative processes without violating their compliance with imposed compliance rules. Altogether the CPro project will provide the basis for the practical application of business process management technology in collaborative and inter-organizational scenarios.

Collaborations among different business partners have gained tremendous interest during the last years. One example are the so called virtual factories where suppliers, producers, and customers collaborate in order to produce, offer, and consume goods that they would not be able to manage on their own. The core of the collaboration are the business processes of the partners, for example, the process that describes, manages, and executes the production of a certain component, as well as the interactions between these partner-specific, internal processes. The internal processes, the interfaces to the other partners, as well as the interactions between the partners form so called process choreographies. Choreographies are often very complex and may crave for adaptations due to various reasons such as changed legal regulations or new competitors in the market. Often in order to react to such changes in the environment one or several partners have to adapt their internal processes. These internal adaptations might be local, but often have effects on the interactions with the partners and transitively on their internal process. This requires the determination of change effects on the choreography and the subsequent propagation to other partners. Manually checking and determining the effects would be very time-consuming and error-prone, specifically, if additional rules and requirements have to be respected due to compliance reasons. Hence, an automatic solution or at least support is required. Hence, the goal of the C3Pro project was to offer comprehensive system-based support for change propagation in process choreographies by respecting internal and external rules at the same time. The core of the developed framework is the change propagation process, i.e., the process of defining, predicting, checking, negotiating, and propagating changes in process choreographies. As shown in the project results, this process comprises different phases which can become quite complex. One significant reason is that in a fully distributed setting the details on the internal partner processes are not visible to the other partners due to confidentiality reasons. Moreover, respecting requirements and rules that are additionally imposed on the choreography have to be considered as well, i.e., it had to be analyzed how changes affect the compliance of the choreography with local and global rules. The most important results of the project are a comprehensive change framework for process choreographies, techniques for the prediction of change effects and their negotiation between the partners, checking techniques for compliance of process choreographies at the presence of changes, as well as comprehensive prototypical implementations. The results will significantly further the application and implementation of process choreographies in key applications such as Industrie 4.0 and the medical domain.