vBPMN: Event-Aware Workflow Variants by Weaving BPMN2 and Business Rules

When workflows are modeled for practical use, workflow variants often have to be considered to fit dynamically changing context factors. If there is a rich workflow context with a large value space, contemporary BPM solutions lack the support for on-the-fly generated variants, requiring explicit one-by-one modeling instead. Researchers have recognized the value of business rules for variant and adaptation support. However, there is still a need for dedicated standards-based constructs for context-dependent event- and exception-handling. Motivated by a realistic example, we therefore foster a framework for the combined use of business rules with a BPMN adaptation pattern catalogue. As the core contribution of this work, we substantiate our framework with a metamodel called vBPMN, which is weaved from BPMN2 and the R2ML rule language and allows for the convenient definition of variant models.