Change Support for Collaborative Business Process Families through Change Patterns and Domain Patterns

The high complexity and variability of business processes led to creation of repositories of process models with large collections of process variants (i.e., process families) related each other. Therefore the companies, more and more often, adopt process-aware information systems (PAISs), which offer promising perspectives for the flexible enterprise computing. Process variants can be managed using approaches, as several cases study have shown, focused on configuration and dynamic re-configuration. Some configuration decisions should be deferred to the run-time phase for effective management of process variants, and PAIS systems should be able to dynamically re-configure the variants in response to contextual changes. They should be able to dynamically adapt themselves in order to manage process variants linked to emerging needs over time. The authors, starting from the use of change patterns in the collaborative business process variants, believe that the use of change pattern is not enough in order to support completely enterprises needs in the management of their business process. It's needed identify, first of all, business process domain patterns before applying change patterns in PAIS systems. The authors therefore propose a new architecture for PAIS systems that takes into account of two different kinds of process patterns.