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Astract: In model-driven software development, software models are the main artifacts used not only for supporting brainstorming, analysis, and design purposes, but also for generating executable code. Such software models are usually not created by one single developer, but within a team. To coordinate team work, versioning systems have proven to be indispensable for managing modifications performed by different modelers at the same time. When concurrently performed modifications are contradicting each other, the standard versioning paradigm requires the person who detected the conflict to resolve it immediately in order to keep the evolved artifacts in a consistent state. Whereas this approach works well in later phases of the software development process, in early phases, when the development team had not established a consolidated view on the system under development yet, the conflicts might provide valuable information on the various intentions of the modelers. This information might be lost if removed in an undocumented manner by a single modeler. We propose an alternative versioning paradigm for models, where conflicts are temporarily tolerated and discuss its technical realization for current modeling languages such as the UML. The resolution of conflicts is then not performed by one single modeler but within a team so that a consolidated version of the model is obtained.

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Astract: As every software artifact, also software models are subject to continuous evolution. The operations applied between two successive versions of a model are crucial for understanding its evolution. Generic approaches for detecting operations a posteriori identify atomic operations, but neglect composite operations, such as refactorings, which leads to cluttered difference reports. To tackle this limitation, we present an orthogonal extension of existing atomic operation detection approaches for detecting also composite operations. Our approach searches for occurrences of composite operations within a set of detected atomic operations in a post-processing manner. One major benefit is the reuse of specifications available for executing composite operations also for detecting applications of them. We evaluate the accuracy of the approach in a real-world case study and investigate the scalability of our implementation in an experiment.

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Astract: Standardized business documents are a prerequisite for successful information exchange in electronic business transactions. The United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and eBusiness (UN/CEFACT) provides a conceptual modeling approach, called Core Components, used by Business Partners (BPs) for defining business document models (BDMs). BDMs are essential for defining service interfaces in service-oriented systems. However, in such a highly dynamic environment with ever-changing market demands, BPs are confronted with the need to revise their BDMs resulting in a multitude of different versions. BPs may dictate the use of new versions of BDMs, but small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) may not always adopt new BDM versions due to the cost and effort involved, inhibiting automated electronic information exchange. In this article, we propose a framework including (i) a classification of the impact of changes in BDMs, (ii) evolution templates for the automated transformation of business documents between different BDM versions, and (iii) mitigation strategies for evolutions where fully-automated and semantic-preserving transformations are not feasible. Having such a framework at hand provides SMEs with a low-cost and light-weight approach for dealing with evolving market requirements and hence evolving business documents. Finally, we analyze the evolution of UN/CEFACT's Cross Industry Invoice which has been mandated to be used for electronic invoicing within the European Union as well as present a critical discussion of the evolution templates defined.

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Astract: Current business document standards, such as EDIFACT, are defined in an all-embracing manner and, thus, usually include several thousands of elements. This is due to the fact that a standardized document type represents a superset of all data elements required in any industry, in any geopolitical region, etc. Furthermore, standardized document types are defined as stand-alone documents, similar to paper-based documents, comprising all information from previous process steps. In other words, standardization neglects the notion of processes by repeating information in different documents of the same process. In this paper, we propose a methodology for assessing redundancies in business document exchanges and evaluate different real-world industry message implementation guidelines (MIGs) with respect to their efficiency in reducing complexity and redundancies. Insights on redundancies can help companies and standardization committees to improve designs of MIGs and entire EDI standards. Furthermore, one can use the concepts presented in this paper to compare different MIGs with regard to their (dis)similarities, which might be useful when two organizations are to be merged and their IT systems consolidated.

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Astract: Business Process Management (BPM) has gained significant adoption in practice for enabling organizations to increase their effectiveness, efficiency, and flexibility. This broad adoption has not only been fostered by a rich and wellestablished theory to model, analyze, simulate, and enact business processes, but also by internationally accepted standards and mature technologies. Caused by the ever increasing speed and volatility of markets and the dynamics of new technologies, such as cloud infrastructures and mobile communications, we face a new generation of business processes, which we refer to as living inter-organizational processes. Such processes are not in control of one single organization; instead, they are enacted by multiple organizations, where no participating party possesses full control over the entire process. Such processes often involve a high number of actors that might even be unknown in advance. These actors require various degrees in participation, they are acting in heterogeneous environments. Moreover, such processes are often weakly structured or designed in an ad-hoc manner, and have to be continuously subject to evolution. Unfortunately, existing theories, methodologies, and technologies cannot cope with this challenging combination of aspects, which all have to be considered when dealing with living inter-organizational processes. The state of the art typically addresses singular aspects in isolation. However, a holistic approach to these challenges bears a tremendous potential. This paper aims to contribute towards a holistic approach to living inter-organizational processes. To this end, we describe different perspectives on inter-organizational processes and identify challenges for making them living processes.

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Astract: One and the same inter-organizational business process - such as e-procurement - may be executed differently in different industries, geopolitical regions, etc. Thus, a standardized reference model for inter-organizational business process must be customized to the specific business context (industry, region, etc.). In order to share, search, and (partially) re-use context specific adaptations it is essential not only to store the adaptations, but also a business context model where these adaptations are valid. Therefore, we present our ontology based business context model and explain how it can be applied to generic models of semantically interoperable data blocks, so-called Core Components. Core Components are standardized by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT), and their adaptations are exchanged between business partners in the course of inter-organizational business processes. If we could assign a business context to a business process, we could prevent negative trends in today's business, such as interoperability issues, inconsistencies and heterogeneous interpretations of the interchanged electronic business documents.

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Astract: Today, business processes are modeled without taking into deeper consideration the context of the business environment where they will be later executed. As a consequence, initiation, management and delayed adjustments of business processes are demanding, time-consuming and very often impossible tasks. In this paper we summarize crucial advantages and disadvantages of different Context modeling approaches, and we define the Context related to the scope of the business environment particularly. If we could assign a Business Context to a business process, we could undermine negative trends in today's business, such as interoperability issues, inconsistencies and heterogeneous interpretations of different business processes.

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Astract: Business document standards usually cover a hierarchical structure of thousands of elements that may be relevant in any business context (any industry, any geopolitical region, etc.). In order to use a business document standard in a specific context, user groups define so-called implementation guidelines based on a subset consisting usually of 3-5% of the overall elements. When one defines a new implementation guideline for a specific context, one has always to start from scratch, which is time-consuming and also leads to heterogeneous interpretations of the standard. It is our goal to speed up the development process and to create more homogeneous implementation guidelines by learning from existing models. In the previous phases of our research we have developed the Enhanced Unified Context (E-UCM) model to represent business context. If we could assign instances of this model to already existing business document implementation guidelines, we may guess the subset of a new implementation guideline for a required BC. Accordingly, this paper describes our approach to calculate the content model (subset) of a message implementation guideline which is relevant in a required BC presented by the E-UCM context model.