Propagation of event content modification in business processes

Abstract

Business processes are composed mainly of activities and events. The latter has gained much focus recently which has resulted in the drift towards Event-Driven Business Process Management (EDBPM). Events are used in both monitoring and controlling the execution of business processes. They are considered to be instantaneous and their content cannot be modified after they occur. However, this is not always the case in the real world. An event’s content can be modified at runtime under circumstances such as: earlier event information containing errors, or new information being obtained about the event. In such cases, the content modification for that event must be taken into consideration in the execution of the process. Additionally, the modified event’s content may affect other events within the process resulting in altering the content of those events as well. Therefore, it is important to determine the propagation of event content modification in an event network within a business process. In this work, we determine the types of event content modifications that can occur within processes, how content modification of one event affects other events within the process, and how the modification affects the process as a whole.