The Deployment of an Enhanced Model-Driven Architecture for Business Process Management

TL;DR

This paper presents an enhanced, self-describing, version-controlled business process management system based on a description-driven approach, enabling dynamic evolution and traceability of workflows to meet changing business needs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel application of the CRISTAL description-driven architecture to business process management, allowing dynamic system evolution and provenance tracking.

Findings

Enables dynamic adaptation of business processes

Supports versioning and traceability of workflows

Demonstrates successful deployment in real-world business scenarios

Abstract

Business systems these days need to be agile to address the needs of a changing world. Business modelling requires business process management to be highly adaptable with the ability to support dynamic workflows, inter-application integration (potentially between businesses) and process reconfiguration. Designing systems with the in-built ability to cater for evolution is also becoming critical to their success. To handle change, systems need the capability to adapt as and when necessary to changes in users requirements. Allowing systems to be self-describing is one way to facilitate this. Using our implementation of a self-describing system, a so-called description-driven approach, new versions of data structures or processes can be created alongside older versions providing a log of changes to the underlying data schema and enabling the gathering of traceable (provenance) data. The CRISTAL software, which originated at CERN for handling physics data, uses versions of stored descriptions to define versions of data and workflows which can be evolved over time and thereby to handle evolving system needs. It has been customised for use in business applications as the Agilium-NG product. This paper reports on how the Agilium-NG software has enabled the deployment of an unique business process management solution that can be dynamically evolved to cater for changing user requirement.