An indexing structure for maintaining configurable process models

Abstract

During the business process modeling phase, different environments and languages have been proposed. All of them are trying to narrow the communication gap between both business and IT users or making modeling task as optimal as possible. From these perspectives, we prioritize assisting business users to express in an efficient and easy way their requirements (i.e., defining their business process models). In this context, reusing existing process models is well supported and preferred rather than modeling from scratch. Configurable business process models aim at merging different process variants into a single configurable model. In this paper, we define an indexing structure to represent configurable process models. We give a set of structuring principles and we show how to maintain this structure when adding a new variant. We adopt a hierarchical representation of business goals variations. The contribution of our structure is that it allows for modularity handling. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.