Extending Feature Models to Express Variability in Business Process Models (original) (raw)
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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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
On managing business processes variants
Data & Knowledge Engineering, 2009
Variance in business process execution can be the result of several situations, such as disconnection between documented models and business operations, workarounds in spite of process execution engines, dynamic change and exception handling, flexible and ad-hoc requirements, and collaborative and/or knowledge intensive work. It is imperative that effective support for managing process variances be extended to organizations mature in their BPM (Business Process Management) uptake so that they can ensure organization wide consistency, promote reuse and capitalize on their BPM investments. This paper presents an approach for managing business processes that is conducive to dynamic change and the need for flexibility in execution. The approach is based on the notion of process constraints. It further provides a technique for effective utilization of the adaptations manifested in process variants. In particular, we will present a facility for discovery of preferred variants through effective search and retrieval based on the notion of process similarity, where multiple aspects of the process variants are compared according to specific query requirements. The advantage of this approach is the ability to provide a quantitative measure for the similarity between process variants, which further facilitates various BPM activities such as process reuse, analysis and discovery.
The variability level of average-size Business Information Systems (BIS) is highly enough for making the design of this kind of systems a complex task. There is an approach, called Process Family Engineering (PFE), that tries to ease the design of BIS using ideas from the Software Product Lines (SPL) field. Roughly speaking, they propose to, first, study the variability of the system without entering into details by means of building a variability model (called feature model), that is used later for building the business process. However, in PFE the process of deriving the business process from the feature model is performed manually. In addition, they use feature models with a different meaning that is commonly accepted in SPL. In this paper, we provide a rigorous description for the new meaning of feature models, and mapping relationship that clearly defines how to use the information in the FM for obtaining the basic structure of the business process (that needs to be completed manually). In addition, as a proof of concepts, we have implemented an MDD transformation that provides the expected results.
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.
Goal Oriented Variability Modeling in Service-Based Business Processes
Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013
In any organization, business processes are designed to adhere to specified business goals. On many occasions, however, in order to accommodate differing usage contexts, multiple variants of the same business process may need to be designed, all of which should adhere to the same goal. For business processes modeled as compositions of services, automated generation of such goal preserving process variants is a challenge. To that end, we present our approach for generating all goal preserving variants of a service-based business process. Our approach leverages our earlier works on semantic annotations of business processes and service variability modeling. Throughout our paper, we illustrate our ideas with a realistic running example, and also present a proof-of-concept prototype.
Context-Based Variant Generation of Business Process Models
Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2014
Nowadays, variability management of process models is a major challenge for Process-Aware Information Systems. Process model variants can be attributed to any of the following reasons: new technologies, governmental rules, organizational context or adoption of new standards. Current approaches to manage variants of process models address issues such as reducing the huge effort of modeling from scratch, preventing redundancy, and controlling inconsistency in process models. Although the effort to manage process model variants has been exerted, there are still limitations. Furthermore, existing approaches do not focus on variants that come from organizational or informational perspectives of process models. This paper introduces an approach to generate context-sensitive process model variants that come from adaptations in the organizational perspective. The approach is inspired by real life scenarios and has its conceptualization based on general concepts such as abstraction, and polymorphism.