Handling Variability along the Business Process Lifecycle

Ulm University

DBIS-Kolloquium, Victoria Torres Bosch - University of Valencia - Spain, Ort: O27/545, Zeit: 10:00 Uhr, Datum: 20. April 2012

Global markets force enterprises to deal with their business in a wide range of different contexts (different type of clients, different laws and regulations, different cultures, etc.). In spite of these differences, the core business still remains the same. In order to handle this properly, enterprises need tools and techniques that allow them to manage both, commonalities and individualities that can arise in the different contexts of interest. Business processes (BP) are normally used to represent enterprise's business and to drive the IT solutions that allow the business management and execution. Within this BP context, there exist some proposals which mainly focused on how to deal with variability at the modelling level. However, little research has been conducted to provide a complete support to the variability issue within the complete BP lifecycle.

In this presentation I will go through the different challenges that should be faced along the whole BP lifecycle to properly deal with variability. Then, based on the experience we have in other fields such as Model Driven Engineering (MDE) and Product Line Engineering (PLE), I will provide some hints on how these can be used when applied to the BP field.