A Metaheuristic Approach for the Configuration of Business Process Families

Abstract

Business process families provide an over-arching representation of the possible business processes of a target domain. They are defined by capturing the similarities and differences among the possible business processes of the target domain. To realize a business process family into a concrete business process model, the variability points of the business process family need to be bounded. The decision on how to bind these variation points boils down to the stakeholders' requirements and needs. Given specific requirements from the stakeholders, the business process family can be configured. This paper formally introduces and empirically evaluates a framework called ConfBPFM that utilizes standard techniques for identifying stakeholders' quality requirements and employs a metaheuristic search algorithm (i.e., Genetic Algorithms) to optimally configure a business process family.