Variability management in process families through change patterns

Abstract

Context: The increasing adoption of process-aware information systems together with the high variability in business processes has resulted in collections of process families. These families correspond to a business process model and its variants, which can comprise hundreds or thousands of different ways of realizing this process. Managing process variability in this context can be very challenging, labor-intensive, and error-prone, and new approaches for managing process families are necessary.

Objective: We aim to facilitate variability management in process families, ensure process family correctness, and reduce the effort needed for such purposes.

Method: We have derived a set of change patterns for process families from variability-specific language constructs identified in the literature. For validation, we have conducted a case study with a safety standard in which we have measured the number of operations needed to model and evolve the variability of the standard with and without the patterns.

Results: We present 10 change patterns for managing variability in process families and show how they can be implemented. The patterns support the modeling and evolution of process families and ensure process family correctness by automatically introducing and deleting modeling elements. The case study results show that the application of the defined change patterns can reduce the number of operations when modeling a process family by 34% and when evolving it by 40%.

Conclusions: The application of the change patterns can help in effectively modeling and evolving large and highly-variable process families. Their application can also considerably reduce variability management effort. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.