Supporting Customizable Business Process Models Using Graph Transformation Rules

Business Process customization is an active research area in the process management field, dealing with variations/commonalities among processes of a given process family and runtime adaptations of single process instances. Many theoretical approaches have been suggested in the last years; however, practical implementations are rare and limited in their functionality. In this article, a new approach is proposed for capturing customizable process models based on well-known graph transformation techniques and with focus on practical aspects like definition of variation points, linking and propagation of changes, visual highlighting of differences in process variants, and dynamically selecting a specific variant at runtime. The suggested concepts are discussed within case studies, comprising different graph transformation systems for generating process variants supporting (a) variability by restriction, (b) variability by restriction and by extension, and (c) runtime adaptations due to the executing actor. The overall approach is being implemented in the FireStart BPM suite.