A Pattern based methodology for evolution management in business process reuse
This addresses the need for enterprises to reduce costs and time in process design and application development by managing evolution in configurable process models, though it appears incremental.
The paper tackles the problem of managing evolution in configurable business process models, which become insufficient as new variations are needed, by proposing a pattern-based methodology for guiding designers and enabling automated support.
Today, there are Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS) with a set of business process models which vary over time to meet the new requirements. In a competitive environment, the key challenge of enterprises is to reduce the cost and time of process design and application development. For this purpose, research on reuse in business process management have introduced the concept of configurable process models which attempts to manage business process variability, by integrating a set of process variants in a single model. In this context, many research works were interested in creating and elaborating configurable process models. However, this has become insufficient since the configurable process model should itself evolve to add new variations. In turn, this requires a comprehensive support for managing the evolution of configurable process models. In this paper, we present a complete pattern based methodology for managing the evolution of configurable process models in terms of activities, data and resources. Our objective is to propose a process patterns system for guiding designers in modeling and evolving configurable process models. Furthermore, our process patterns system will be used for an automated support so as to manage the evolution of configurable process models.