With a kick-off meeting at the University of Vienna the C³Pro research project was launched in November 2011. C³Pro is a joint Austrian-German research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG, Project No. RE 1402/2-1) and  the Austrian Science Fund (FWF, Project No. I743). The total grant is 540.000 EUR and the project runs over a period of 36 months. Project partners are the Institute of Databases and Information Systems (Prof. Manfred Reichert, David Knuplesch) from the University of Ulm and the Workflow Systems and Technology Group (WST) (Prof. Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, Dr. Walid Fdhila and Tobias Hildebrandt) from the University of Vienna.

Background Information on C3Pro

Improving the effciency and quality of their business processes by automating them and optimizing their interactions with partners and customers have become significant success factors for any enterprise. In connection with Web service technology, the benefits of business process automation and optimization from within a single enterprise can be transferred to collaborative (i.e., cross-organizational) business processes as well. The next step in this evolution will be the emergence of the agile enterprise being able to rapidly implement new processes and to quickly adapt existing ones to environmental changes.

While flexibility issues for internal business processes and their implementation (i.e., process and service orchestrations ) are well understood, the controlled change of interactions between IT-supported partner processes in a collaborative setting (i.e., process choreographies ) has not been adequately addressed so far. If one partner changes its process in an uncontrolled manner, inconsistencies or errors (e.g., deadlocks) regarding these interactions might occur. This is particularly challenging if there exist running instances (i.e., cases) of these process choreographies. As a consequence, adaptations of collaborative business processes turn out to be costly and error-prone. Hence correct behavior of the collaborative processes and state consistency of corresponding process instances have to be ensured. Additionally, compliance of the changed processes and partner interactions with imposed regulations and laws need to be guaranteed. Business process compliance has been addressed by many approaches that mostly deal with the verification of compliance rules imposed on internal business processes. Compliance of collaborative business processes, however, has not been investigated in connection with process changes or with respect to privacy constraints of partner processes.
 
In the C3Pro project - C3Pro stands for Enabling Change And Compliance For Collaborative Processes - we will analyze exibility and adaptivity of collaborative business processes at both design time and runtime. Here, consistency and correctness will be of central interest as well as the provision of change propagation methods to business partners without violating autonomy, security, and trust constraints. Second, we will elaborate on the topic of how to model, integrate, and verify compliance rules imposed on collaborative business processes. Third, we will integrate the results on exibility and compliance of collaborative business process settings into a comprehensive approach that enables us to control the effects of changes on the compliance of the affected collaborative scenarios. Throughout the entire project we will apply action-based research including short research and evaluation cycles based on case studies and proof-of-concept prototypes. Altogether the C3Pro project will provide the basis for the realistic application of business process management technology in collaborative settings; i.e., partner networks will be adequately supported in necessary process changes and compliance verification for their collaborations.