Partial process models to manage business process variants

Today’s process aware information systems deal often with the problem of variants. Variants of process models have to be defined frequently due to several reasons such as: the need to target different customer types, rely on particular IT systems or comply with specific country regulations. Management of process models variants that addresses issues such as consistency between process variants, uncontrolled redundancy, huge modeling efforts, etc is not adequately supported by current Business Process Management (BPM) tool. Thus an automated maintenance of process variants able to tackle the mentioned issues is a well coveted goal. This paper presents an approach to address the issues of providing consistent mechanisms for managing processes variants consistency and reducing the redundancy between process variants in order to achieve a more efficient and effective business process modeling Task. Our approach, Partial Process Models (PPM), is a query-based approach which maintains the link between the variant process models by means of defining process model views. These views are defined using, BPMN-Q, a visual query language for business process models and employ a software engineering like inheritance methodology . Thus, dynamic evaluation for the defined queries of the process views guarantee that the process modeler is able to get up-todate and consistent status of the process model. The PPM approach provides a flexible way to deal with process models variants both via a top-down as well as a bottom-up approach.