A Metaheuristic Approach for the Configuration of Business Process Families

Business process families provide an over-arching representation of the possible business processes of a target domain. They are defined by capturing the similarities and differences among the possible business processes of the target domain. To realize a business process family into a concrete business process model, the variability points of the business process family need to be bounded. The decision on how to bind these variation points boils down to the stakeholders´ requirements and needs. Given specific requirements from the stakeholders, the business process family can be configured. This paper formally introduces and empirically evaluates a framework called ConfBPFM that utilizes standard techniques for identifying stakeholders´ quality requirements and employs a metaheuristic search algorithm (i.e., Genetic Algorithms) to optimally configure a business process family.