Enabling Ad-Hoc Changes to Object-Aware Processes

Contemporary process management systems support users during the execution of repetitive, predefined business processes. However, when unforeseen situations occur, which are not part of the process model serving as the template for process execution, contemporary process management technology is often unable to offer adequate user support. One solution to this problem is to allow for ad-hoc changes to process models, i.e., changes that may be applied on the fly to a running process instance. As opposed to the widespread activity-centric process modeling paradigm, for which the support of instance-specific ad-hoc changes is well researched, albeit not supported by most commercial solutions, there is no corresponding support for ad-hoc changes in other process support paradigms, such as artifact-centric or object-aware process management. This paper presents concepts for supporting such ad-hoc changes in object-aware process management, and gives insights into the challenges we tackled when implementing this kind of process flexibility in the PHILharmonicFlows process execution engine. The development of such advanced features is highly relevant for data-centric BPM, as the research field is generally perceived as having low maturity when compared to activity-centric BPM.