BPModelMasher: Manage Your Process Variants Effectively

Nowadays, modern organizations build large repositories of process models to describe and document their daily business operations. One reason for the large number of process models is the need to adapt with differnt business contexts, i.e. process variants. Automated maintenance of the consistency between process variants is an important goal that saves the time and efforts of process modelers. We present a query-based approach to maintain consistency among process variants called BPModelMasher. In particular, we maintain the link between the variant process models by process model views. These views are defined using, BPMN-Q, a visual query language for process models. Dynamic evaluation for the defined queries of the process views guarantee that the process modeler is able to get up-to-date and consistent status of the process model. In addition, our view-based approach allows building multiple configurations for a holistic view of related variants of the same process model. The conceptual results are illustrated with a real-world sample process on customer service from eBay.