Change patterns and change support features – Enhancing flexibility in process-aware information systems

Abstract

Companies increasingly adopt process-aware information systems (PAISs), which offer promising perspectives for more flexible enterprise computing. The emergence of different process support paradigms and the lack of methods for comparing existing approaches enabling PAIS changes have made the selection of adequate process management technology difficult. This paper suggests a set of 18 change patterns and 7 change support features to foster the systematic comparison of existing process management technology in respect to process change support. While the proposed patterns are all based on empirical evidence from several large case studies, the suggested change support features constitute typical functionalities provided by flexible PAISs. Based on the proposed change patterns and features, we provide a detailed analysis and evaluation of selected approaches from both academia and industry. The presented work will not only facilitate the selection of technologies for realizing flexible PAISs, but can also be used as a reference for implementing flexible PAISs.

A template-based approach for responsibility management in executable business processes

“…Fragments must be subprocess graphs with single entry and single exit nodes (also denoted as hammocks in graph literature (Weber, Reichert, and Rinderle-Ma 2008)) that represent the tasks that are necessary to carry out a given responsibility. Not only the same placeholders as with static templates but also ad-hoc placeholders can be used in the fragments.…”

“…To describe how the process fragments are composed together, we suggest the use of change patterns (Weber, Reichert, and Rinderle-Ma 2008). Change patterns and in particular, a type of them called adaptation patterns, allow users to structurally modify a process model using change operations defined in terms of the process model (e.g., adding an activity in parallel to another one) instead of change primitives defined in terms of the underlying graph (e.g., adding a single node, two control flow edges, and the connectors between them) (Weber, Reichert, and Rinderle-Ma 2008). A consequence of this is that change operations provide a compact way of defining changes on a process because each change operation involves one or more change primitives (e.g., adding an activity in parallel involves up to seven change primitives).…”

Creating and Updating Personalized and Verbalized Business Process Descriptions

“…In this context, we build on [20], which provides a core modeling function set comprising functions F 1 − F 8. The latter cover the most common change patterns for process models [25]. Table 1 gives an overview of possible text modifications and their respective mapping to core functions.…”

“…[25] presents an overview of frequently used patterns for changing process models. Further, [11] summarizes approaches enabling flexibility in PAISs.…”

Guaranteeing Soundness of Configurable Process Variants in Provop

“…A particular process variant can be configured by applying a set of predefined adaptations to a common master process (denoted as base process in Provop). For describing respective adaptations, Provop supports well-defined change patterns [14]: INSERT fragment, DELETE fragment, MOVE fragment, and MODIFY attribute. While the first three patterns may be applied to a model fragment (i.e., a connected subgraph), the latter pattern can be used to modify the value of process element attributes.…”