Context-based variant generation of business process models

Abstract

Nowadays, variability management of process models is a major challenge for Process-Aware Information Systems. Process model variants can be attributed to any of the following reasons: new technologies, governmental rules, organizational context or adoption of new standards. Current approaches to manage variants of process models address issues such as reducing the huge effort of modeling from scratch, preventing redundancy, and controlling inconsistency in process models. Although the effort to manage process model variants has been exerted, there are still limitations. Furthermore, existing approaches do not focus on variants that come from organizational or informational perspectives of process models. This paper introduces an approach to generate context-sensitive process model variants that come from adaptations in the organizational perspective. The approach is inspired by real life scenarios and has its conceptualization based on general concepts such as abstraction, and polymorphism. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.