Towards the Enhancement of Process Families Support using Change Patterns

Abstract

[EN] This paper presents the ongoing research on change patterns for process families. A process family is a collection of related process model variants sharing a number of commonalities (i.e., modeling elements found in all process variants), but also showing differences due to their application context. The research goal is to provide a set of change patterns for dealing with process families regarding all process perspectives and along the entire process lifecycle. Recently, generic and language-independent adaptation patterns were successfully introduced for creating and evolving single business process models. However, they are not sufficient to cope with the variability-specific aspects introduced by process families. The main goal is hence to define a set of a complementary set of generic, language-independent patterns specifically tailored towards the needs of process families. When used in combination with existing adaptation patterns, change patterns for process families will enable the modeling, configuration and evolution of process families at a high-level of abstraction regarding all process perspectives. Further, they will serve as reference for implementing tools or comparing proposals managing process families