Business Process Change Management Based on Data Dependency Graph

This paper proposes a framework for managing business process changes based on the data dependencies, representing data flow requirements among component activities. A process change is defined as a set of changes in temporal precedence relationships of component activities and, in this paper, the change is determined as valid if the change does not violate any of the process-inherent data flow requirements represented in the data dependency graph. Valid process changes guarantee the process to be executed successfully in the phase of process deployment. The proposed framework also helps process owners to enumerate several process scenarios satisfying all the data flow requirements specified in the data dependency graph and monitor the state of business process in execution.