Process View Derivation and Composition in a Dynamic Collaboration Environment

Recently, process view concept emerged out in business process management area. A process view may present only partial contents of a business process to a user, and thereby enables the visibility adjustment of business processes. In aspects of privacy protection and authority control, process views are of practical use for process modelling and execution. Given the complex relations between process users, it is a highly sought-after feature to depict the diversity and variation of the perception of different users towards business processes with process views. This paper presents a role-based process view model, which incorporates the role hierarchy into the process view model. This model enables the view derivation and composition between different users. Therefore, a process view is allowed to be derived from another view or composed from multiple views. A series of rules are defined to guarantee the structural consistency and validity of process views during transformations. A set of algorithms are developed to formalise the procedures of view filtering and merging. An application scenario is used to illustrate the feasibility of the approach.