EVL-BP 2014 - 7th International Workshop on Evolutionary Business Processes (EVL-BP'14)

The EVL-BP workshop series is devoted to evolution in business processes. Enterprises face the challenge of rapidly adapting to dynamic business environments. The traditional approach to process management is only partially appropriate to this new context, and calls for the advent of new, evolutionary business processes. This new approach attempts to address specific issues related to flexibility and adaptation such as design of easily adaptable processes, dynamic handling of unexpected situations, optimality of adaptations, and change management. Central to the field of evolutionary business processes is the notion of requirement, which drive the change of business processes through their life-cycles. The evolution of processes and their underlying software systems becomes more and more an important and interesting topic in business process management. Since the life time of software systems frequently spans many years, business processes modeled on top of systems cannot be assumed to remain fixed, and migration between different versions is essential. As a consequence, modeling and management techniques developed in the context of ad-hoc, short-term composition of services and their processes lack the necessary constructs to concisely express the gradual evolution of processes and software systems and new dynamic, declarative, and/or configurable approaches in this context are required.
The evolutionary approach to business processes raises a number of challenges: extracting declarative specifications from domain experts, expressing these declarative specifications in an appropriate language or formalism, as well as designing, monitoring, checking compliance, configuring, or dynamically adapting business processes according to a set of requirements, identification and systematic handling of changes, management of process versions, or quality attributes and measurement of business processes as predictors of evolutionary business processes. Evolution in business processes takes place in a wide number of domains, and is expected to impact existing and future technology choices, business practices and standardization efforts. This workshop will be an opportunity for participants to exchange opinions, advance ideas, and discuss preliminary results on current topics related to dynamic and declarative business processes. A particular interest will be taken in bridging theoretical research and practical issues. To this end, contributions stating open problems, case studies, tool presentations, or any other work assessing the practical significance of dynamic and declarative business processes by means of concrete examples and situations, will be particularly welcome. Work in progress, position papers stating broad avenues of research, and work on formal foundations of dynamic and declarative business processes are also sought-after.