Dealing with Changes of Time-Aware Processes

The proper handling of temporal process constraints is crucial in many application domains. Contemporary process-aware information systems (PAIS), however, lack a sophisticated support of time-aware processes. As a particular challenge, the execution of time-aware processes needs to be flexible as time can neither be slowed down nor stopped. Hence, it should be possible to dynamically adapt time-aware process instances to cope with unforeseen events. In turn, when applying such dynamic changes, it must be re-ensured that the resulting process instances are

temporally consistent

; i.e., they still can be completed without violating any of their temporal constraints. This paper presents the ATAPIS framework which extends well established process change operations with temporal constraints. In particular, it provides pre- and post-conditions for these operations that guarantee for the temporal consistency of the changed process instances. Furthermore, we analyze the effects a change has on the temporal properties of a process instance. In this context, we provide a means to significantly reduce the complexity when applying multiple change operations. Respective optimizations will be crucial to properly support the temporal perspective in adaptive PAIS.