STABLE LINKING AND PATCHABILITY OF BUSINESS PROCESSES THROUGH HIERARCHICAL VERSIONING

A system, method and computer program product is presented for versioning a business process model. The business process model is decomposed into a number of artifacts. A hierarchical dependency graph is generated for the number of artifacts to produce, for each artifact, a set of referencing artifacts and a set of referenced artifacts. The set of referenced artifacts are compiled by creating a runtime format and computing a unique version identifier for each referenced artifacts, and the unique version identifier for each referenced artifact is incorporated into a version identifier of each associated referencing artifact from the set of referencing artifacts. At least one of the referenced artifacts is modified to produce a new version of the associated referencing artifact.