Conflict Resolution for On-the-fly Change Propagation in Business Processes

Process models are widely used in organisations and can easily become large and complex. In the context of business process management, views are a useful technique to reduce complexity by providing only those process fragments that are relevant for a particular stakeholder. A key challenge in view management is the handling of changes that are performed concurrently by different stakeholders. Since the views may refer to the same process, the performed changes may affect the same region of a business process and cause a conflict. Many approaches have been proposed for resolving conflicts in a post-analysis phase after all changes have been applied. They can be become costly when dealing with multiple changes that lead to multiple conflicts which cannot be resolved automatically and require an additional negotiation phase between stakeholders. In this paper we propose a framework for the on-the-fly conflict resolution of changes that have been performed on views their underlying reference process. Different to existing approaches this framework applies behaviour consistency rules for business processes which consider the execution semantics and can be checked efficiently on the structure of processes without generating all possible execution traces or keeping track of change operations.