Towards Automated and Fine-grain Reuse of      Configurable Business Process models

Abstract :

Configurable Business Process models (CBP-models for short) are inspired from the design by reuse paradigm. They present a starting point for modelling business processes. The individualization of these models can be done by means of a questionnaire which is a business-related method. However, the creation and update of such a questionnaire is manual which makes it time consuming and error-prone. Moreover, CBP-models are meant to be reused from the start event to the end event. In other words, business experts are not allowed to reuse a process fragment from a CBP- model. Thus, we propose a CPB-model with a hierarchical structure and capability annotated tasks. Such a structure enables business modelers to point directly to a target fragment and reuse it. Furthermore, the capability annotation enabled us to develop an algorithm that generates automatically a question flow for a given CBP-model.

Keywords:  Configurable business process models, BP model reuse, Semantic business processes.

 General view of our approach:

  Our approach generates automatically a question flow for a given HCCBP and deploy it in a process execution engine.

A business expert needs to execute the deployed question flow in order to individualize  a desired variant.

In the following , we  introduce three examples of our approach execution:

v Use case 1:  Dessert Ordering example

HCCPB model of ordering dessert example

Fichier  : allConfigurable. xml

 

The question flow generated for ordering dessert example.

The interaction between end user and activity engine 

The resulted variant corresponding to the given answers

Use case 2: Travel Request Example

HCCPB model of Travel Request example

Fichier xml

The question flow generated for Travel Request example.

 Use case 3:  Customs example.

HCCPB model of customs example

Fichier  :. xml

 

The question flow generated  for Customs example.