Towards Object Life Cycle-Based Variant Generation of Business Process Models

Variability management of process models is a major challenge for Process-Aware Information Systems. Process model variants can be attributed to any of the following reasons: new technologies, governmental rules, organizational context or adoption of new standards. Current approaches to manage variants of process models address issues such as reducing the huge effort of modeling from scratch, preventing redundancy, and controlling inconsistency in process models. Although the effort to manage process model variants has been exerted, there are still limitations. Furthermore, existing approaches do not focus on variants that come from change in organizational perspective of process models. Organizational-driven variant management is an important area that still needs more study that we focus on in this paper. Object Life Cycle (OLC) is an important aspect that may change from an organization to another. This paper introduces an approach inspired by real life scenario to generate consistent process model variants that come from adaptations in the OLC.