Modeling Design-Time Variability in Business Processes: Existing Support and Deficiencies

Abstract

Recently the interest in managing families of business processes rather than individual processes has increased, mainly due to the need to maintain different variants of the same business process or similar business processes in the same organization. This led to the extension of different business process modeling languages (BPMLs) in order to support the representation of design-time variability, namely variability that is resolved when designing the particular business processes (the variants). However, the evaluation of these languages expressiveness is still in an inceptive stage. In particular, the abilities to express variable elements in different granularity levels and to guide variability in business process models have not been examined. To tackle this lack, we propose a two-dimensional framework which explicitly refers to granularity and guidance. We further examine how existing extensions of BPMLs support these dimensions, point on deficiencies in their expressiveness, and discuss the implications of those deficiencies through examples from a case study.