Management and evolution of business process variants

PhD ceremony: Mr. P. Bulanov, 11.00 uur, Academiegebouw, Broerstraat 5, Groningen

Dissertation: Management and evolution of business process variants

Promotor(s): prof. M. Aiello

Faculty: Mathematics and Natural Sciences

Business Process (BP) management systems allow the automation of workflows inside a company or organization and typically represent the core purpose and added value of that entity.

If an organization is large enough to have divisions and affiliates, it may come to the situation when different divisions have similar processes implemented in similar but not the same way. Such a family of similar processes can be seen as a set of different versions of the same generic process, but they are different entities from the BP engine perspective. Therefore, it becomes difficult to maintain all such versions at once or make a bulk modification if some general organization-wide rules have changed and those changes must be reflected in many business processes.

In this thesis, the problem of maintaining a set of separated business process versions is analyzed from different perspectives. First, a declarative-based framework for modeling a generic process is presented. This framework allows to model a business process in traditional way with additional declarative rules on the top of it. The rules are implemented as additional visual elements, such as arrows, lines, or groups (sub-processes).

Second, the problem of change propagation is addressed in the form of automated business process transformations. Those transformations are based on comparison of two business processes based on their temporal representations. And finally, the problem of on-the-fly process repair is addressed with the help of automatically generated one-time business processes.