Developing a context model of process variants for business process integration

Abstract

Since the integration of business process variants can be affected by contextual information the aim of this paper is to propose the development of a context model for Business Process Integration that considers the propagation of process changes towards process variants of the reference model. The method used to develop such a model focuses on following stages: (1) conceptualization of process variants, by building a related ontology, (2) identification of contextual elements, (3) definition of operational and organizational constraints; (4) formalization of contextual situations in the variants, and (5) construction of a reasoning mechanism for searching and retrieval of process variants. In order to validate the context model proposed we implemented both a prototype and a case study that consider each of the five stages proposed. The obtained results demonstrate the effectiveness of using this kind of approaches for business process integration.