Model-driven support for business process families with the Common Variability Language (CVL)

Abstract

To achieve a business objective, organizations may require variants of the same business process that depend on the context in which they are enacted. Several proposals have emerged to deal with the variability of business processes, focused on the modeling of a so-called process family. The proposals try to avoid modeling each variant separately, which implies duplication and maintenance of the common parts. Few of them also focus on automatically deriving a process variant from the definition of a process family, which is a central and complex task. One of these proposals is the Common Variability Language (CVL), which allows representing variability transparently in a host language. In this extended article we present a proposal integrating CVL together with the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN 2.0) for modeling business process families, and the use of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques for the automated generation of specific process variants. We also describe the integrated tool support we provide for the complete approach, the proposal validation with a case study from a project we carried out within our university, and an evaluation by using the VIVACE framework.