Towards change and verification support in collaborative business processes

The automation of business processes raises several challenges for enterprises. One of those challenges relates to the maintenance and verification of business processes, more precisely how to facilitate changes within existing business processes even at the run-time. Furthermore, changing a collaborative business process can have an impact on the contract specified between the involved parties. Thus, a business process may need to adapt and meet reliably the new contract. In this paper, we discuss an approach to support change and verification for such collaborative processes. This approach consists of (1) a protocol, called Change Protocol for Collaboration (CPC), for managing the changes that can have an incidence on the contract; (2) an algorithm for supporting migration of running business process instances to their new schemas; and (3) a verification framework for supporting of the accuracy of changes before their adoption.