Ontology-Based Change Impact Assessment in Dynamic Business Processes

Abstract

The business process models are often subjected to change rapidly in order to cope with the market demands. It may be useful for companies to adapt a monitoring mechanism to achieve flexible business process models. It is also desirable to control the ripple effects of a change on whole or part of the business process and its running instances. It requires an exhaustive understanding of concerned changes and their application levels. In this article, we propose a methodology based on dependency analysis for an a priori change impact analysis in the business process models. The approach is based on the ontology definitions to describe the dependency relationships. The major objective is to obtain a knowledge base to help the designers and business experts to estimate the associated risk of intended changes and the effort required for their implementation.