Design Maintenance in Process Eco-Systems

This paper addresses the problem of managing business process changes at the design level within a complex business process repository. We argue that a formal process eco-systems view can provide a particular useful solution to the problem in which their inter-process relationships can be properly described. Our intent is to build a modular infrastructure to support change management in process eco-systems by leveraging a change propagation approach that would maintain the inter-process relationships. This permits us to propagate the changes, made on a particular process, to the rest of the processes for maintaining the relationship equilibrium of such eco-system. Our experimental evaluation suggests that the propagation of change can be efficiently achieved, which suggests that the real source of complexity stems from the redesign of individual models.