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Variability patterns for business processes in BPMN

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Abstract

Many entities, both in academia and the business sector, urge an efficient improvement of business processes. However, when it comes to addressing this point, each slight disparity in the business rules and/or objectives translates into a separate model, which is neither practical nor acceptable as it burdens the host process-aware information system with repetitive and almost verbatim instances. To solve this issue, we propose considering variability. Variability will serve as a business process improvement technique to efficiently design and run a variable business process throughout different business situations that are similar to one another is some ways yet differ in others. First, we define variability within the context of business processes. Second, we present a set of variability patterns and explain how they are used. We validate our approach via the business process improvement patterns known and used by the community. The variability design patterns are a series of business process improvement patterns for building business process with variability and efficiently acting on the improved process performance metrics.

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Notes

  1. Business Process Model and Notation.

  2. Business Process Modeling Language.

  3. fiveguys.com.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. LRIT, Research Unit Associated to the CNRST (URAC 29), FSR, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco

    Alaaeddine Yousfi & Rajaa Saidi

  2. HCII, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Alaaeddine Yousfi & Anind K. Dey

  3. INSEA, BP 6217, Rabat, Morocco

    Rajaa Saidi

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  1. Alaaeddine Yousfi
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  2. Rajaa Saidi
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  3. Anind K. Dey
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Correspondence to Alaaeddine Yousfi.

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Yousfi, A., Saidi, R. & Dey, A.K. Variability patterns for business processes in BPMN. Inf Syst E-Bus Manage 14, 443–467 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-015-0290-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-015-0290-7

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