Modelling Business Process Variability for Design-Time Configuration (original) (raw)
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Modeling Business Process Variability for Design-Time Configuration
Handbook of Research on Business Process Modeling
A reference process model represents multiple variants of a common business process in an integrated and reusable manner. It is intended to be individualized in order to fit the requirements of a specific organization or project. This practice of individualizing reference process models provides an attractive alternative with respect to designing process models from scratch; in particular, it enables the reuse of proven practices. This chapter introduces techniques for representing variability in the context of reference process models, as well as techniques that facilitate the individualization of reference process models with respect to a given set of requirements.
Business process variability modeling
It is common for organizations to maintain multiple variants of a given business process, such as multiple sales processes for different products or multiple bookkeeping processes for different countries. Conventional business process modeling languages do not explicitly support the representation of such families of process variants. This gap triggered significant research efforts over the past decade, leading to an array of approaches to business process variability modeling. In general, each of these approaches extends a conventional process modeling language with constructs to capture customizable process models. A customizable process model represents a family of process variants in a way that a model of each variant can be derived by adding or deleting fragments according to customization options or according to a domain model. This survey draws up a systematic inventory of approaches to customizable process modeling and provides a comparative evaluation with the aim of identifying common and differentiating modeling features, providing criteria for selecting among multiple approaches, and identifying gaps in the state of the art. The survey puts into evidence an abundance of customizable process-modeling languages, which contrasts with a relative scarcity of available tool support and empirical comparative evaluations.
Business Process Lines to deal with the Variability
2010
Variability proved to be a central concept in different domains, manufacturing, software development etc. in order to develop solutions that can be easily adapted to different organizational settings and different sets of customers at a low price. We argue that families of business process models can facilitate the installation of situated models in different organizations. We propose a representation system called Map to capture variability in process models expressed in an intentional manner through business goals and strategies. The paper presents an intentional view of the business process variability and illustrates it in an excerpt of a real case in the Electricity Supply Industry. The kernel of an organizational level model is also introduced to allow the organizational implementation of each variant.
Business Process Modeling : Variability and Scope
2014
Maintaining numerous variants of a given business process is very important for companies, which have dissimilar procedures such as book-keeping and trade used to present various goods for different countries. Languages of business process modeling are of routine type and do not contain the families of business process variants description clearly. The analysis of variability in business process modeling is carried out to cover gaps which were observed in the past. This study demonstrates key concepts of business process variants using an example in present methodologies in the area based on a common set of values. The outlines exhibit that initial methods are defined by the fact that they expand a conservative process modelling language with constructs that formulate it and make it capable to define personalized business process models. A personalized business process model defines a relations of process variants in such a way that every variant can be made by adding up or removing...
A Qualitative Comparison of Approaches Supporting Business Process Variability
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2013
The increasing adoption of Process-Aware Information Systems, together with the reuse of process knowledge, has led to the emergence of process model repositories with large process families, i.e., collections of related process model variants. For managing such related model collections two types of approaches exist. While behavioral approaches take supersets of variants and derive a process variant by hiding and blocking process elements, structural approaches take a base process model as input and derive a process variant by applying a set of change operations to it. However, at the current stage no framework for assessing these approaches exists and it is not yet clear which approach should be better used and under which circumstances. Therefore, to give first insights about this issue, this work compares both approaches in terms of understandability of the produced process model artifacts, which is fundamental for the management of process families and the reuse of their contained process fragments. In addition, the comparison can serve as theoretical basis for conducting experiments as well as for fostering the development of tools managing business process variability.
Extending Feature Models to Express Variability in Business Process Models
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2015
In complex organizations Business Processes tends to exist in different variants that typically share objectives and part of their structure. In recent years it has been recognized that the explicit modeling of variability can brings important benefits to organizations that can more easily reflect on their behavior and more efficiently structure their activities and processes. Particularly interesting in this respect is the situation of the Public Administration that delivers the same service using many different and replicated processes. The management of such complexity ask for methods explicitly supporting the modeling of variability aspects for Business Processes. In this paper we present a novel notation to describe variability of Business Processes and an approach to successively derive process variants. The notation takes inspiration from feature modeling approaches and has been implemented in a real tool using the ADOxx platform. The notation, and the corresponding approach, seems particularly suitable for the Public Administration context, and it has been actually experimented in a complex real scenario.
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, 2015
This paper proposes an extension for the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), named BPMN*, that based on the elements of the feature model (FM), commonly used to represent variability, intends to represent variability in Business Processes Line (BPL). This notation is evaluated by means of an empirical study whose main objective is to compare it with other notation named variant-rich BPMN (vrBPMN) regarding the productivity and correctness of the business process model template (BPMT), which is one of the artifacts that compose a BPL. From the results it was possible to observe that the proposed notation allows the elaboration of BPMT with less errors, although modeling time was kept almost the same.
Reflecting business process variability in information systems
Abstract Information systems are a fundamental support for the business processes of a firm. Information systems should be shaped on the needs of the business process throughout the life of the firm. This poses the problem of tracking changes in the business process and to reflect those changes in the information system. Assumptions and constraints are necessary in any real software project but can impair flexibility and evolution.
Understandability Issues of Approaches Supporting Business Process Variability
2012
The increasing adoption of Process-Aware Information Systems, together with the reuse of process knowledge, has led to the emergence of process model repositories with large process families, i.e., collections of related process model variants. For managing such related model collections two types of approaches exist. While behavioral approaches take supersets of variants and derive a process variant by hiding and blocking process elements, structural approaches take a base process model as input and derive a process variant by applying a set of change operations to it. However, at the current stage no framework for assessing these approaches exists and it is not yet clear which approach should be better used and under which circumstances. Therefore, to give first insights about this issue, this work compares both approaches in terms of understandability of the produced process model artifacts, which is fundamental for the management of process families and the reuse of their contained process fragments. In addition, the comparison can serve as theoretical basis for conducting experiments as well as for fostering the development of tools managing business process variability.