Process Migration Framework - Virtualising and Documenting Business Processes

The process migration framework (PMF) aims to extract a process from a shared system that hosts multiple processes, and redeploy it in a dedicated virtual machine. Moreover, the PMF supports the documentation of the business process implementation. Main issues when migrating processes are the identification of the process environment (i.e. software packages, files, system settings) and the recreation of this environment. Existing migration tools mainly focus on entire systems or operate on a low level that is difficult to maintain. Main concepts of the PMF are the static and dynamic extraction of process information, monitoring of the process execution, and the usage of a process context model to describe the process environment. The application of the PMF will be demonstrated in the context of a civil engineering business process and an e-Science workflow. Using the PMF it is shown that maintainability, flexibility, shareability, and preservability of business processes is improved by deploying them in dedicated systems, and a comprehensive documentation about the process environment can be provided.