Modeling and validation of business process families

Process modeling is an expensive task that needs to encompass requirements of different stakeholders, assure compliance with different standards, and enable the flexible adaptivity to newly emerging requirements in today's dynamic global market. Identifying reusability of process models is a promising direction towards reducing the costs of process modeling. Recent research has offered several solutions. Such solutions promote effective and formally sound methods for variability modeling and configuration management. However, ensuring behavioral validity of reused process models with respect to the original process models (often referred to as reference process models) is still an open research challenge. To address this challenge, in this paper, we propose the notion of business process families by building upon the well-known software engineering discipline—software product line engineering. Business process families comprise (i) a variability modeling perspective, (ii) a process model template (or reference model), and (iii) mappings between (i) and (ii). For business process families, we propose a correct validation algorithm ensuring that each member of a business process family adheres to the core intended behavior that is specified in the process model template. The proposed validation approach is based on the use of Description Logics, variability is represented by using the well-known Feature Models and behavior of process models is considered in terms of control flow patterns. The paper also reports on the experience gained in two external trial cases and results obtained by measuring the tractability of the implementation of the proposed validation approach.