On maintaining consistency of process model variants

Abstract

Today's enterprises are dynamic where many variances of business process models can exist due to several reasons such as: the need to target different customer types, rely on particular IT systems or comply with specific country regulations. Automated maintenance of the consistency between process variants is an important goal that saves the time and efforts of process modelers. In this paper, we present a query-based approach to maintain consistency among process variants. We maintain the link between the variant process models by means of defining process model views. These views are defined using, BPMN-Q, a visual query language for business process models. Therefore, dynamic evaluation for the defined queries of the process views guarantee that the process modeler is able to get up-to-date and consistent status of the process model. In addition, our view-based approach allows the building of a holistic view of related variants of the same process model. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.