Business Process Evolution: a Rule-based Approach

Mario Lezoche (1) , Michele Missikoff (1) , Leonardo Tininini (2)

1 LEKS - Laboratory for Enterprise Knowledge and Systems
2 CNR - CNR

Business Process (BP) evolution is a key aspect of BP lifecycle. There are several reasons that may cause BP modifications. Among these, particularly important are the changes of the enterprise organization and operation strategies, which can be captured by business rules (BRs). We focus here on a BP-based enterprise that, in addition to the enterprise BPs, is also regulated by a set of BRs: such BPs and BRs need to be globally consistent (and have to be maintained consistent after any changes). In this paper we present an ontological approach capable of representing BRs and BPs in a coherent way. Then, our objective is twofold: (i) clarifying the intended meaning of a BR that (when firstly formulated) may have more than one interpretation; (ii) identifying all processes in the BP repository that are (or have become) inconsistent with the BRs and thus need to be changed to reestablish the overall consistency.

Mots clés: Business Process Modelling; Business Rules; Ontologies

Domaines: Modélisation et simulation

Mario Lezoche, Michele Missikoff, Leonardo Tininini. Business Process Evolution: a Rule-based Approach. 9th Workshop on Business Process Modeling, Development, and Support (BPMDS'08), Jun 2008, Montpellier, France. pp.ISSN 1613-0073 vol-335. ⟨hal-00656687⟩