Requirements and Tools for Variability Management

Explicit and software-supported Business Process Management has become the core infrastructure of any medium and large organization that has a need to be efficient and effective. The number of processes of a single organization can be very high, furthermore, they might be very similar, be in need of momentary change, or evolve frequently. If the ad-hoc adaptation and customization of processes is currently the dominant way, it clearly is not the best. In fact, providing tools for supporting the explicit management of variation in processes (due to customization or evolution needs) has a profound impact on the overall life-cycle of processes in organizations. Additionally, with the increasing adoption of Service-Oriented Architectures, the infrastructure to support automatic reconfiguration and adaptation of business process is solid. In this paper, after defining variability in business process management, we consider the requirements for explicit variation handling for (service based) business process systems. eGovernment serves as an illustrative example of reuse. In this case study, all local municipalities need to implement the same general legal process while adapting it to the local business practices and IT infrastructure needs. Finally, an evaluation of existing tools for explicit variability management is provided with respect to the requirements identified.

Business process customization using process merging techniques

Abstract—One of the important application of service com-position techniques lies in the field of business process man-agement. Essentially a business process can be considered as a composition of services, which is usually prepared by domain experts, and many tasks still have to be performed manually. These include the design and creation of the process itself or the modification of an existing one when business requirements change. Any form of automation and support we can bring to the tasks of maintenance and evolution are highly beneficial. One way of creating a new business process is by the combination of two existing ones which naturally should retain the behavioral features of both original processes. In this paper, we introduce a formal language to express behavioral properties of processes together with its semantics, and we show how it supports process merging. Keywords-Business process; Process evolution; Process main-tenance; Process merging; Temporal logic I