Context-Aware Process Injection: Enhancing Process Flexibility by Late Extension of Process Instances

Companies must cope with high process variability and a strong demand for process flexibility due to customer expectations, product variability, and an abundance of regulations. Accordingly, numerous business process variants need to be supported depending on a multiplicity of influencing factors, e.g., customer requests, resource availability, compliance rules, or process data. In particular, even running processes should be adjustable to respond to contextual changes, new regulations, or emerging customer requests. This paper introduces the approach of context-aware process injection. It enables the sophisticated modeling of a context-aware injection of process fragments into a base process at design time, as well as the dynamic execution of the specified processes at run time. Therefore, the context-aware injection even considers dynamic wiring of data flow. To demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of the approach, a case study was conducted based on a proof-of-concept prototype developed with the help of an existing adaptive process management technology. Overall, context-aware process injection facilitates the specification of varying processes and provides high process flexibility at run time as well.