Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
A Foundational Approach for
Managing Process Variability
Matthias Weidlich
1
, Jan Mendling
2
,andMathiasWeske
1
1
Hasso Plattner Institute at the University of Potsdam, Germany
{
Matthias.Weidlich,Mathias.Weske
}
@hpi.uni-potsdam.de
2
Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Germany
Jan.Mendling@wiwi.hu-berlin.de
Abstract.
A business process often shows different variations in a large
organisation, due to different legal requirements in different countries,
deviations in the IT infrastructure, or organisational differences. These
variants are documented in separate independent process models. Man-
agement of these variants imposes various challenges. Invariant behaviour
needs to be identified and redundancies among the variants have to be
avoided. In this paper, we address these questions by defining a set-
algebra for behavioural profiles. These profiles represent a behavioural
abstraction of process models that can be computed eciently. We trace
back many questions of process variability management to set-theoretic
operations and relations defined for behavioural profiles. As a validation,
we apply our approach to an industry model collection.
1
Introduction
In large organisations, a business process often exists in many variations. Those
stem from different legal requirements in different countries, deviations in the IT
infrastructure, or organisational differences [1]. The existence of
process variants
is inevitable - a certain degree of variability is needed to meet the concerns
of a specific organisational unit. Variants are often documented in independent
process models. As the variability is not made explicit, synergies between variants
are hard to explore and process harmonisation is impeded.
Recently, approaches to control the creation of process variants based on well-
defined change patterns [2,3,4] or configurations [5,6] have been presented. How-
ever, enforcement of such a controlled variability of processes is hard to achieve
once process variants are created independently in different organisational units.
Therefore, we focus on the use case of managing decoupled process variants. To
this end, identification of commonalities and differences between process variants
is of central importance. Those have to be made explicit to allow for a compar-
ison of the variants. This is a prerequisite for any process harmonisation effort
that aims at reducing the amount of allowed process variability.
There are two fundamental challenges towards ecient management of pro-
cess variants: the appropriate specification of formal operations to support rea-
soning with process variants, and the foundation of such operations upon an
