Modeling Process Interactions with Coordination Processes

Abstract

With the rise of data-centric process management paradigms, small and interdependent processes, such as artifacts or object lifecycles, form a business process by interacting with each other. To arrive at a meaningful overall business process, these process interactions must be coordinated. One challenge is the proper consideration of one-to-many and many-to-many relations between interacting processes. Other challenges arise from the flexible, concurrent execution of the processes. Relational process structures and semantic relationships have been proposed for tackling these individual challenges. This paper introduces coordination processes, which bring together both relational process structures and semantic relationships, leveraging their features to enable proper coordination support for interdependent, concurrently running processes. Coordination processes contribute an abstracted and concise model for coordinating the highly complex interactions of interrelated processes.

Coordinating large distributed relational process structures

“…The object-aware process management approach has introduced coordination processes to coordinate relational process structures [38]. While a coordination process can serve as a central coordinator, the concept itself is flexible enabling the use of multiple coordination processes to coordinate a relational process structure.…”

“…This paper builds upon existing work of coordination processes [37][38][39] and contributes the decentralized and distributed application of coordination processes for objectaware business process management. The major contributions are as follows:…”

“…Processes and their relations have to be identified and, based on these connections, suitable coordination constraints need to be specified and enforced. A coordination constraint then denotes a dependency that exists between two or more processes [38]. A coordination constraint usually takes the form of a plain-text statement, e.g., "An application may only be created as long as the corresponding job offer is published," though formal representations are possible as well.…”

“…Table 2), which is needed to customize a semantic relationship to specifically represent a coordination constraint. constraints with the help of semantic relationships, which are then enforced at run-time [38]. The concept allows specifying sophisticated coordination constraints for vast structures of interrelated process instances with an expressive, high-level graphical notation using a minimum amount of modeling elements.…”

“…Fundamental challenges of these data-centric approaches are to determine which processes exist and how they relate to other processes, as well as the coordination of the resulting structure of interdependent processes. Recently, the relational process structure [39] and coordination processes [38] have been proposed to tackle these challenges. A relational process structure captures processes and their relations in a hierarchical construct, which is then used by a coordination process to specify and enforce coordination constraints.…”