Finding Collective Decisions: Change Negotiation in Collaborative Business Processes

Change propagation has been identified as major concern for process collaborations during the last years. Although changes might become necessary for various reasons, they can often not be kept local, i.e., at one partner's side, but must be partly or entirely propagated to one or several other partners. Due to the autonomy of partners in a collaboration, change effects cannot be imposed on the partners, but must be agreed upon in a consensual way. In our model of this collective decision process, we assume that each partner that becomes involved in a negotiation has different alternatives on how a change may be realized, and evaluates these alternatives according to his or her individual costs and benefits (utilities). This paper presents models from group decision making that can be applied for handling change negotiations in process collaborations in an efficient and fair way. The theoretical models are evaluated based on a proof-of-concept prototype that integrates an existing implementation for change propagation in process collaborations with change alternatives, utility functions, and group decision models. Based on simulating a realistic setting, the validity of the approach is shown. Our prototype supports the selection of change alternatives for each partner during negotiation that depending on the group decision model used, provides solutions emphasizing efficiency and/or fairness.