A Multi-layered Architecture for Process Variation Management

Organizations and enterprises have to constantly re-engineer and customize business processes to stay competitive in their market. These modifications and customizations result in a large number of similar processes that lead to high costs of deployment and maintenance. This paper presents a multi-layer architecture for efficient management of process variations. The approach consists of organizing related processes into a base layer and multiple variation layers that separate the common fragment of the process from its customized parts. It avoids explosions of duplicate similar processes and allows business users flexible and easy change management of their processes. The implementation with the Eclipse modeling framework is also done to validate the proposed architecture.