Partial process models to manage business process variants. (16th September 2011)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Pascalau, Emilian; Awad, Ahmed; Sakr, Sherif; Weske, Mathias
• Is Part Of: International journal of business process integration and management. Volume 5:Number 3(2011)
• Page Start: 240
• Page End: 256
• Publication Date: 2011-09-16
• Subjects: business process design -- reuse -- querying business processes -- process variants; Business -- Computer networks -- Periodicals; Industrial management -- Periodicals; 658.054605
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1741-8763

Abstract

Today's process aware information systems deal often with the problem of variants. Management of process model variants that addresses issues such as consistency between process variants, uncontrolled redundancy, huge modelling efforts, etc. is not adequately supported by current business process management (BPM) tools. This paper presents an approach to address the issues of providing consistent mechanisms for managing process variants and reducing the redundancy in order to achieve a more efficient business process modelling task. Our approach, partial process models (PPMs), is a query-based approach which maintains the link between the variant process models by means of process model views. These views are defined using BPMN-Q, and these views employ a software engineering like inheritance methodology. Thus, dynamic evaluation for the defined queries of the process views guarantees that the process modeller is able to get up-to-date and consistent status of the process model.