Managing Variability in Process Models by Structural Decomposition

Business process management (BPM) provides companies with techniques for analyzing, designing, and executing operational processes which are documented as process models. Often, companies face the problem of supporting similar processes, i.e., process variants, within their organizational boundaries. This may be due to cultural particularities of running business or/and different legal regulations enforced at different departments operating worldwide. Effective mechanisms for managing process variants should allow companies to achieve operational consistency and effective reuse of their process repositories. This paper presents a novel approach for managing variability in process models based on the structural decomposition and representation of process variants as an integrated set of building blocks called process modules.