Correct Configuration of Process Variants in Provop

Abstract

When engineering process-aware information systems (PAISs) one of the fundamental challenges is to cope with the variability of business processes. While some progress has been achieved regarding the configuration of process variants, there exists only little work on how to accomplish this in a correct manner. Configuring process variants constitutes a non-trivial challenge when considering the large number of process variants that exist in practice as well as the many syntactical and semantical constraints a configured process variant has to obey in a given context. In previous work we introduced the Provop approach for configuring and managing process variants. This paper picks up the Provop framework and shows how it ensures correctness of configurable process variants by construction. We discuss advanced concepts for the context- and constraint-based configuration of process variants, and show how they can be utilized to ensure correctness of the configured process variants. In this paper we also consider correctness issues in conjunction with dynamic variant re-configurations. Enhancing PAISs with the capability to correctly configure process models fitting to the given application context, and to correctly manage the resulting process variants afterwards, will enable a new quality in PAIS engineering.