Towards Run-time Flexibility for Process Families: Open Issues and Research Challenges

The increasing adoption of process-aware information systems and the high variability of business processes in practice have resulted in process model repositories with large collections of related process variants (i.e., process families). Existing approaches for variability management focus on the modeling and configuration of process variants. However, case studies have shown that run-time configuration and re-confifiguration as well as the evolution of process variants are essential as well. Effectively handling process variants in these lifecycle phases requires deferring certain configuration decisions to the run-time, dynamically re-configuring process variants in response to contextual changes, adapting process variants to emerging needs, and evolving process families over time. In this paper, we characterize these flexibility needs for process families, discuss fundamental challenges to be tackled, and provide an overview of existing proposals made in this context.