To trace and guide evolution in configurable process models

Today, research on business process management (BPM) outlines the importance of business process reuse through reference process models which are interested in capturing common practices of organizations. Consequently, reusing these reference process models stresses the necessity of managing a set of process variants. In this context, configurable process model solutions have been developed to facilitate customization of business process in a specific scenario. However, configurable process model should evolve in order to meet new business requirements. To address this issue, we propose a process patterns based approach for leading configurable process model evolution. For supporting traceability of the transition from a given version of a configurable process model to another, an evolution metamodel has been defined. In this paper, we present i) only one pattern of our proposed patterns system, the Activity substitution process pattern, and ii) a proposition of the evolution metamodel.

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