| Article ID | Journal | Published Year | Pages | File Type |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 396551 | Information Systems | 2012 | 19 Pages |
Variants of the same process can be encountered within one organization or across different organizations. For example, different municipalities, courts, and rental agencies all need to support highly similar processes. In fact, procurement and sales processes can be found in almost any organization. However, despite these similarities, there is also the need to allow for local variations in a controlled manner. Therefore, many academics and practitioners have advocated the use of configurable process models (sometimes referred to as reference models). A configurable process model describes a family of similar process models in a given domain. Such a model can be configured to obtain a specific process model that is subsequently used to handle individual cases, for instance, to process customer orders. Process configuration is notoriously difficult as there may be all kinds of interdependencies between configuration decisions. In fact, an incorrect configuration may lead to behavioral issues such as deadlocks and livelocks. To address this problem, we present a novel verification approach inspired by the “operating guidelines” used for partner synthesis. We view the configuration process as an external service, and compute a characterization of all such services which meet particular requirements via the notion of configuration guideline. As a result, we can characterize all feasible configurations (i.e., configurations without behavioral problems) at design time, instead of repeatedly checking each individual configuration while configuring a process model.
► Variants of the same business process can be encountered within one organization or across different organizations. ► We provide a new approach to check the correctness of configurable models and their configurations. ► The configuration guideline assists process designers in selecting suitable variants. ► Our approach is based on partner synthesis which helps moving computation time from run-time to design-time.
