A knowledge‐based approach to manage configurable business processes

Abstract

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This paper stresses out the struggle of organizations when managing multiple variants of the same business process. Each variant constitutes a response to structural and/or functional needs that overtime become unsustainable due to the multiplicity and complexity of these needs. To mitigate this struggle, a knowledge-based approach for capturing these versions into a single configurable business process and splitting this process into fragments is discussed in the paper. The approach builds a configuration knowledge base to track the business process variability (ie, particularities of each business process variant). Variants are represented as a new configurable process structure tree resulting from fragmenting a business process. Implementation of the approach is, also, reported in this paper