Enhancing Business Process Flexibility by Flexible Batch Processing

Abstract

Business Process Management is a powerful approach for the automation of collaborative business processes. Recently concepts have been introduced to allow batch processing in business processes addressing the needs of different industries. The existing batch activity concepts are limited in their flexibility. In this paper we contribute different strategies for modeling and executing processes including batch work to improve the flexibility (1) of business processes in general and (2) of the batch activity concept. The strategies support different flexibility aspects (i.e., variability, looseness, adaptation, and evolution) of batch activities. The strategies provide a systematic approach to categorize existing and future batch-enabled BPM systems. Furthermore, the paper provides a system architecture independent from existing BPM systems, which allows for the support of all the strategies. The architecture can be used with different process languages and existing execution environments in a non-intrusive manner.