Version Management in the Business Process Change Context

The current business endures a fast changing environment, whichdrives organisations to continuously adapt their business processes to newconditions. In this background, the workflow version control plays an importantrole for the change management of business processes. To better handle theversions of evolving workflow process definitions, a new versioning method isintroduced in this paper. To capture the dynamics of the workflow evolvement,we propose a novel version preserving directed graph model to represent therun time evolvement of a workflow process, and devise a series of modificationoperations to characterise workflow updating on the fly. The extraction ofworkflow versions from a version preserving graph is also discussed with twodifferent extraction strategies. Particularly, our method allows the execution ofmultiple workflow instances of different versions within a single graph, andsupports the evolvements initiated by temporary changes.