Model-driven management of BPMN-based business process families

Abstract

Business processes can have variants depending on specific business requirements, which lead to the definition of a so-called business process family. Since conventional business process modeling languages, e.g., the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), do not explicitly support variants’ specification, several proposals have emerged to deal with it. However, they mainly focus on languages’ definition, while less emphasis is made on providing complete variability management. This article presents a Model-Driven Engineering approach for managing BPMN-based business process families composed of a metamodel for conceptualizing process families, a high-level process for managing them (involving model transformations for the configuration of variants), and tool support for the complete approach. We validated the proposal using a real-world example from a university and an empirical study with real users. Users rated the support tool’s principal functional suitability and usability features as very good. Many improvement opportunities were detected, e.g., version control, collaborative work, and error reporting. We also provide a literature review and thorough evaluation of BPMN-based business process families’ proposals using the VIVACE framework.

Patterns for modeling process variability in a healthcare context

“…Several approaches to modeling variability in processes have been proposed (see (Delgado et al. , 2022; Kalibatiene and Vasilecas, 2021) for recent surveys on the topic).…”

“…The technical realization of such a transformation is outside the scope of this paper; a discussion of mapping our patterns to BPMN and CMMN has been submitted as a separate article. Using appropriate frameworks (see Delgado et al. , 2022; Kalibatiene and Vasilecas, 2021 for recent surveys on the topic), even the formal modeling of a group of process variants can be supported, which is an even more complex task than modeling a single process.…”

Inhance Deep Customizations in a Multi-tenant SaaS Application using the BPMN

“…On one hand, Ribeiro et al [10] introduced a new BPMN extension that aims to Model Inter-Organizational Processes. On the other hand, Delgado et al [9] proposed a model-driven approach to deal with the BPMN variants. The use of the BPMN to model executable business logics enhances the tenant-specific deep customization in a multi-tenant SaaS application by reducing cost and time of production.…”