Bitemporal Support for Business Process Contingency Management

Abstract. Modern organisations are increasingly moving from traditional monolithic business systems to environments where more and more tasks are outsourced to third party providers. Therefore, processes must operate in an open and dynamic environment in which the management of time plays a crucial role. Handling time, however, remains a challenging issue yet to be fully addressed. Traditional processing systems only consider business events in a single time dimension, but are unable to handle bitemporal events: events in two time dimensions. Recently, back-end systems have started to provide increased support for handling bitemporal events, but these enhanced capabilities have not been carried through to business process management systems. In this paper, we consider the possible relationships that exist between bitemporal properties of events and we show how these relationships affect a business process. In addition, we demonstrate how bitemporal events can be handled to prevent certain undesired effects on the business process. Keywords: Bitemporal events, Business process design, Business rules, Process reconfiguration