Description

When designing process-aware information systems variants of the same process often have to be specified. Each variant then constitutes an adjustment of a particular process to specific requirements. Current BPM tools do not adequately support the management of such process variants.

Usually, the variants have to be kept in separate process models. This leads to huge modeling and maintenance efforts. In particular, more fundamental process changes often require the adjustment of all process variants derived from the same process. This redundancy is both time consuming and error-prone. The Provop approach, which we develop in this project, will provide a more flexible solution for managing process variants along the process life cycle. In particular, process variants can be configured out of a basic process following an operational approach; i.e., a specific variant is derived from the basic process by applying a set of well-defined change operations to it. Provop provides full process life cycle support and allows for flexible process configuration resulting in a maintainable collection of process variants.