Assured Automatic Dynamic Reconfiguration of Business Processes

NAHABEDIAN, LEANDRO; BRABERMAN VICTOR; DIPPOLITO R. NICOLAS; JEFF KRAMER; UCHITEL SEBASTIAN

INFORMATION SYSTEMS

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2022

0306-4379

In order to manage evolving organisational practice and maintain compliancewith changes in policies and regulations, businesses must be capable of dynam-ically reconfiguring their business processes. However, such dynamic reconfigu-ration is a complex, human-intensive and error prone task. Not only must newbusiness process rules be devised but also, crucially, the transition between theold and new rules must be managed.In this paper we present a fully automated technique based on formal specifi-cations and discrete event controller synthesis to produce correct-by-constructionreconfiguration strategies. These strategies satisfy user-specified transition re-quirements, be they domain independent - such as delayed and immediatechange - or domain specific. To achieve this, we provide a discrete-event controltheoretic approach to operationalise declarative business process specifications,and show how this can be extended to resolve reconfiguration problems. In thisway, given the old and the new business process rules described as Dynamic Cond-ition Response Graphs, and given the transition requirements described withlinear temporal logic, the technique produces a control strategy that guidesthe organisation through a business process reconfiguration ensuring that alltransition requirements and process rules are satisfied. The technique outputsa reconfiguration DCR whose traces reproduce the controller?s reconfigurationstrategy. We illustrate and validate the approach using realistic cases and ex-amples from the BPM Academic Initiative.