Synchronization of Adaptive Process Models Using Levels of Abstraction

Today many companies use several technologies, modeling languages, and software tools for designing, analyzing, and executing their business processes. The need for adapting processes to new requirements, to reuse parts of processes, and to involve different stakeholders in the process design leads to process changes on multiple process models of different granularity and level of abstraction. These changes cause a need for process models on different abstraction levels to be synchronized in order to avoid inconsistencies. To bridge the resulting Business IT gap, we introduce an approach which supports the creation and adaptation of business processes on different abstraction levels based on reusable process building blocks. The advantage of the approach is that changes of the process can be driven by IT and Business in the same manner, though on different levels of abstraction. In addition to the methodology for this approach, we define reusable process building blocks, describe sychronization mechanisms, and propose a supporting infrastructure. We show the application of these concepts in a real world case study.