Management von Prozessvarianten

Abstract

Usually, for a particular business process different variants exist. Each of them constitutes an adjustment of a reference process model to specific requirements building the process context. Contemporary process management tools do not adequately support the modeling of such process variants. Either the variants have to be specified as separate process models or they are expressed in terms of conditional branches within the same process model. Both methods often lead to redundancies making model adaptations a time consuming and error-prone task. This phd thesis presents the Provop approach which provides a flexible and powerful solution for managing business process variants along their lifecycle. A particular process variant can be configured at a high level of abstraction by applying a set of well-defined change operations to a reference process model. Advanced concepts for the design, modeling and flexible execution of such a reference process model are discussed as well as for the adjustments required to configure the different process variants. Furthermore, a proof-of-concept demonstrator is presented, that was used for technical and practical validation of the developed concepts in several case studies. Altogether, Provop provides a flexible and powerful solution for process variant management.