Evolution of Instance-Spanning Constraints in Process Aware Information Systems

Business process compliance has been widely addressed resulting in works ranging from proposing compliance patterns to checking and monitoring techniques. However, little attention has been paid to a specific type of constraints known as instance spanning constraints (ISC). Whereas traditional compliance rules define constraints on process models, which are checked separately for each instance, ISC impose constraints that span multiple instances. This paper focuses on ISC evolution and its impact on process compliance. In particular, ISC change operations, as well as change strategies are defined, and the impact on both the ISC monitoring engine and the process instances during run time are analyzed. The concepts are prototypically implemented.