Designing business capability-aware configurable process models

Abstract

Process Aware Information Systems manage processes within organisations on the basis of business process models. These models can be created either from scratch or by reusing exiting reference process models.Particular types of reference models are configurable process models that are created by merging multiple models into a single one that can be customized to the needs of the business experts. Using those models presents two main challenges: their creation and their configuration.In this paper, we focus on the first challenge and propose a novel algorithm for merging process models into a configurable process model. The difference in our work is the pre-annotated process models with their business capabilities that report on what actions each process element achieves. Our algorithm generates configurable models that are also annotated with their capabilities that can be used to face the second challenge of these models: the configuration phase.We tested our algorithm using real-world process models to evaluate the required creation time and resulting compression rate after merging the input models. The results show that the models can be created in few milliseconds and achieving a compression rate of 50%. We further carried out interviews with domain experts to assess the usefulness and the level of maturity of this work. The results show the importance of the automation of process merging using a tool support that we proposed. However, further adaptation efforts are required to integrate this work in the working environments of the interviewed experts.