“Adore”, a logical meta-model supporting business process evolution

The Service Oriented Architecture (Soa) paradigm supports the assembly of atomic services to create applications that implement complex business processes. Since “real-life” processes can be very complex, composition mechanisms inspired by the Separation of Concerns paradigm (e.g. features, aspects) are good candidates to support the definition and the upcoming evolutions of large systems. We propose Adore, “an Activity meta-moDel supOrting oRchestration Evolution” to address this issue. The Adore meta-model allows process designers to express in the same formalism business processes and fragments of processes. Such fragments define additional activities that aim to be integrated into other processes and adequately support their evolution. The underlying logical foundations of Adore allow the definition of interference detection rules as logical predicate, as well as the definition of consistency properties on Adore models. Consequently, the Adore framework supports process designers while they design and then apply evolutions on large processes, managing the detection of interferences among fragments and ensuring that the composed processes are consistent and do not depend on the order of the composition.

► In this paper, we propose a logical meta-model used to support the evolution of complex business processes.
► The logical orientation allows the definition of interference detection mechanisms.
► The evolution algorithm ensures several properties (e.g., path preservation).
► The approach was validated on two large case studies.