Business process change management based on process model synchronization of multiple abstraction levels

Management of business processes is typically performed on multiple levels, each with different granularity, language constructs, and abstraction. Starting from an initial sketch of the activities to be performed, several refinements are made to entirely specify the business process, its artifacts, and participants. Then, information relevant for process execution can be added to enable efficient automation in the context of a service-oriented architecture (SOA). However, dealing with changes initiated by business or technology is a key difficulty in this approach. If change management is not performed properly then process models become out of sync which results in losing the alignment of business and IT. To address this challenge, we propose a synchronization method based on model element correspondence that considers change management between process models on different abstraction levels. We show how synchronization can be established and changes are propagated using a change queue for synchronization continuity. Finally we present a prototypical implementation of the key concepts.