Supporting Customizable Business Process Models Using Graph Transformation Rules

Business Process customization is an active research area in the process management field, dealing with variations/commonalities among processes of a given process family and runtime adaptations of single process instances. Many theoretical approaches have been suggested in the last years; however, practical implementations are rare and limited in their functionality. In this article, a new approach is proposed for capturing customizable process models based on well-known graph transformation techniques and with focus on practical aspects like definition of variation points, linking and propagation of changes, visual highlighting of differences in process variants, and dynamically selecting a specific variant at runtime. The suggested concepts are discussed within case studies, comprising different graph transformation systems for generating process variants supporting a variability by restriction, b variability by restriction and by extension, and c runtime adaptations due to the executing actor. The overall approach is being implemented in the FireStart BPM suite.