Controlling the Evolution of Product-Based Collaboration Contracts

The literature on product-based workflow design considers only static collaborative environments where the product model is static and does not change. However the possible evolution of the product model and thus its impact on the collaborative environment are not considered despite the importance of this evolution for innovative product design. As a result the uncontrolled changes can easily break the cross-organizational process that links the different stakeholders in the collaborative environment. In this paper we present a framework that builds the collaboration contract from the product model and supports a controlled evolution of this contract. We leverage this framework by a set of management operations (services) that enable the contract evolution and investigate how a tailoring operation will not impact the executable cross-organizational process unless this process is maintained executable by the workflow engine. These operations are provided as services by a collaborative platform and displayed through a standard-based user interface.