Business process variability modeling : a survey

Abstract

It is common for organizations to maintain multiple variants of a given business process, such as multiple sales processes for different products or multiple bookkeeping processes for different countries. Conventional business process modeling languages do not explicitly support the representation of such families of process variants. This gap triggered signi¿cant research efforts over the past decade leading to an array of approaches to business process variability modeling. This survey examines existing approaches in this ¿eld based on a common set of criteria and illustrates their key concepts using a running example. The analysis shows that existing approaches are characterized by the fact that they extend a conventional process modeling language with constructs that make it able to capture customizable process models. A customizable process model represents a family of process variants in a way that each variant can be derived by adding or deleting fragments according to con¿guration parameters or according to a domain model. The survey puts into evidence an abundance of customizable process modeling languages, embodying a diverse set of constructs. In contrast, there is comparatively little tool support for analyzing and constructing customizable process models, as well as a scarcity of empirical evaluations of languages in the ¿eld.

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