Process Instances and a Business Process Platform
If there is an architecture with a Business Process Platform, then there is the question, which role do the process instances play in such a system.
The business processes are reflected by business objects themselves, which are linked with each other. Events are correlated to the business objects. This makes sense, because the business objects are clearly identifiable, because they are related to a concrete business transaction. There are concrete customers related with it, suppliers, products, dates – the things that make them easy to identify and find.
In contrast, if there are process instances, which have only an anonymous ID, like a Globally Unique Identifier (GUID), then the relationship to a concrete business transaction is rather loosely. Therefore it is hard to manage them. Furthermore if there are business attributes inside of the process instance, typically they are in generic containers (not always) and therefore difficult to use in queries.
So which process instances are needed within a Business Process Platform beside the business objects themselves? Probably some for approval. Some for ad-hoc processes. Not much more comes to my mind.
Monitoring a business process itself is a different story. For this not process instances are needed, but chains of business objects that are actually process objects and some process instances – that I already mentioned.
