BPCE: A Prototype for Co-Evolution between Business Process Variants through Configurable Process Model

With the continuous development of business process management technology, the increasing business process models are usually owned by large enterprises. In large enterprises, different stakeholders may modify the same business process model. In order to better manage the changeability of processes, they adopt configurable business process models to manage process variants. However, the process variants will vary with the change in enterprise business demands. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the co-evolution of the process variants so as to effectively manage the business process family. To this end, a novel framework for co-evolution between business process variants through a configurable process model is proposed in this work. First, the mapping relationship between process variants and configurable models is standardized in this study. A series of change operations and change propagation operations between process variants and configurable models are further defined for achieving propagation. Then, an overall algorithm is proposed for achieving co-evolution of process variants. Next, a prototype is developed for managing change synchronization between process variants and configurable process models. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed process change propagation method are verified based on experiments on two business process datasets. The experimental results show that our approach implements the co-evolution of process variants with high accuracy and efficiency.