A Design Methodology for Modeling Flexible Business Processes

Abstract

Business process flexibility is a major challenge since it is crucial to consider the current environment, which is becoming very fluctuating, and to adapt processes accordingly. To deal with this issue, version-based approach is recognized as a key notion. This approach allows defining several versions for each process to take into account the significant changes occurring to this process while keeping track of updates. Several contributions have proposed solutions based on versions to deal with process flexibility. However, to the authors' knowledge, none of them offered a version derivation approach under a design methodology to help designers to model and handle versions of processes. So, this paper recommends a design methodology based on versions, including a derivation approach to create new versions based on previously modeled ones.