Process Evolution in a Distributed Process Execution Environment

To allow the distribution of control and visibility of cross-organizational process models and increase availability and performance of the processes, a process model can be fragmented into logically different parts and distributed in the enterprise architecture. Fragmentation algorithms and execution environments which connect the fragmented process model parts together, recreating the original process execution semantics, have been proposed in earlier work. However, a critical challenge that is left open is the ability of the distributed process execution environment to respond effectively to process changes. In this paper, the authors describe the difficulties, advantages and issues of process model change support in a fragmented and distributed environment. Moreover, the authors propose a system which tackles the identified issues and allows the propagation and coordination of process changes at runtime in the distributed process execution architecture.