Enterprises face the challenge of rapidly adapting to dynamic business environments. Evolving markets, policies, regulations, technologies, and business models are some of the many vectors of change along which enterprise systems must constantly align. The capability of rapidly adapting systems and processes to an ever-changing environment to leverage existing resources has become a crucial factor of an organization's agility.

The traditional approach to process management is only partially appropriate to this new context, and calls for the advent of new, dynamic business processes. This new approach attempts to address specific issues related to flexibility and adaptation: design of easily adaptable processes, dynamic handling of unexpected situations, optimality of adaptations.

Central to the field of dynamic business processes is the notion of requirement. Indeed, all the vectors of change mentioned above act indirectly upon a business process by modifying the results or the functionalities expected from this process. Moreover, not all modifications of a process are equally desirable, and all must retain initial "correctness" criteria. These functionalities, along with broader business policies or narrower constraints of technical nature, make dynamic business process particularly suited to a declarative approach to their modelling and design.

In declarative business processes, the results, rather than the tasks, are described by means of a language. The actual way in which these results should be obtained is not specified. The new job is no longer to design and express a sequence of steps that the process should follow, but rather to describe as precisely as possible the results or the functionalities that are expected from it. It represents a further step toward an increased interoperability between processes by focusing on requirements rather than implementation.

The declarative approach to dynamic business processes raises a number of challenges: extracting declarative specifications from domain experts, expressing these declarative specifications in an appropriate language or formalism, as well as designing, monitoring, checking compliance or dynamically adapting business processes according to a set of requirements. Dynamic and declarative business processes have proved their use in a wide number of domains, and are expected to impact existing and future technology choices, business practices and standardization efforts.

Addressing the manifold open issues related to dynamic and declarative business processes requires both to develop new concepts and to build on existing research in related domains; for example, techniques derived from formal methods or artificial intelligence can be adapted or extended. Moreover, practitioners drawn to the field complement these results with a wealth of potential applications in the industry. This conjunction of factors makes dynamic and declarative business processes a stimulating and fertile research field.

The theme of the 3rd International Workshop on Dynamic and Declarative
Business Processes is On Supporting Business Process Evolution. The
evolution of processes and their underlying software systems becomes more
and more an important and interesting topic in business process management.
Since the life time of software systems frequently spans many years,
business processes modelled on top of systems cannot be assumed to remain
fixed, and migration between different versions is essential. As a
consequence, modelling and management techniques developed in the context of
ad-hoc, short-term composition of services and their processes lack the
necessary constructs to concisely express the gradual evolution of processes
and software systems and new dynamic and/or declarative approaches in this
context are required.

This workshop will be an opportunity for participants to exchange opinions,
advance ideas, and discuss preliminary results on current topics related to
dynamic and declarative business processes. A particular interest will be
taken in bridging theoretical research and practical issues. To this end,
contributions stating open problems, case studies, tool
presentations, or any other work assessing the practical significance of
dynamic and declarative business processes by means of concrete examples and
situations, will be particularly welcome. Work in progress, position papers
stating broad avenues of research, and work on formal foundations of dynamic
and declarative business processes are also sought-after.