Context-Aware Business Process Versions Management

Abstract

This work deals with a very active and promising research area that is the Business Process (BP) flexibility. One possible way to deal with this flexibility is the conjoint use of versioning and contextualization techniques. Versioning permits BP evolution by supporting the alternative use of BP versions. Contextualization ensures the definition of use conditions of BP versions to help the designer choosing a version among several ones. In a previous work, BP flexibility had been addressed using only versioning technique by considering the informational, organizational and process perspectives. In this work, the authors show how they conjointly use both versioning and contextualization techniques to address the BP flexibility. More precisely, they propose an extension of the VBP2M meta-model (Versioned Business Process Meta Model), introduced in their previous work, by adding a contextual perspective that offers two levels of contexts granularity (local and global). This perspective is illustrated using a well-known case study «automatic production process of mineral water bottle ». An extension of the VBPQL language (Versioned Business Process Query Language) is also introduced to allow the definition, manipulating and querying of BP versions' contexts. Furthermore, the authors propose an ontology-based method to select the appropriate BP version. Finally, they present our tool that represents the implementation of the proposed solution.