Applying CVL to business process variability management

Abstract

Business Processes (BP) exist in many variants depending on the application context. The use of variability mechanisms in BPs becomes essential for organizations to reduce development and maintenance efforts. However, such mechanisms entail big challenges. At design time, poor model specifications can turn process variants into difficult-to-maintain and understand artifacts. At runtime, process variants require continuous adaptations to achieve business goals in highly dynamic execution contexts. In order to address these challenges, in this paper we present a proposal to manage process variants at design time and runtime. At design time, process variants are modeled by combining a BP modeling language with the Common Variability Language. Then, at runtime, based on the created models and on the current context, process variants are adapted by means of MoRE-BP, a reconfiguration engine that is capable of performing dynamic adaptations automatically. An online-shop scenario illustrates our proposal and a proof-of-concept prototype validates its feasibility.