Business Process Modeling: A Multi-perspective Approach Integrating Variability

Abstract

In the current economic and technological context, changes of different kinds affecting the organization and its processes are inevitable. They can come from government regulations, the emergence of new competitors, the resources availability, etc. To maintain their efficiency and competitiveness, organizations are constrained to adapt their processes continuously to these changes. Thus business processes have to be efficiently modeled in order to give them their capacity to be adaptable. In addition, the factors whose variations require changes in the processes execution have to be identified and formalized. We introduce in this paper a multi-perspective approach for business process modeling which include five perspectives, i.e. the intentional perspective, the organizational perspective, the functional perspective, the non-functional perspective and the non-organizational resource-perspective. The proposed approach integrates variability - in both organizational and functional perspectives - providing several possible representations of the same process, it also allows to capture change factors related to roles of actors and quality requirements. Furthermore, it allows taking into account change factors related to the context.