Onto-VP2M: A New Approach to Model and Manage Collaborative Process Versions using Contexts and Ontologies

Collaborative process (CP) flexibility is an active research area in the field of business process management (BPM). It deals with both foreseen and unforeseen changes in the environment where CPs operate. In the literature, the version-based approach is largely used to cope with CP flexibility. However, BPM practitioners from various organizations can encounter some difficulties in a multi-version setting, of which when they must select the most appropriate CP version to be executed. Therefore, the aim of this article is to offer a solution to help them in this delicate task by proposing an ontology-based approach to model and query the context of versions of CP. More precisely, the authors recommend a new ontology, entitled BPM-Context-Onto, and a framework, entitled Onto-VP2M-Framework, providing support for (1) context version modeling in the BPM area, and (2) context-based querying exploiting reasoning mechanisms of the proposed ontology. The evaluation of the recommended framework shows that combining ontology with context reasoning is a promising idea in the BPM area. This novel framework has been examined within a real case study, namely the Subsea Pipeline CP.