Variation knowledge-based approach to handling business process changes

The increase in interest in supporting organization to gain a competitive edge in a rapidly changing market environment necessitates considering means to handle business process changes. This paper is focused on approaches of flexible business process management and attempts to address variation issue encountered in adapting run-time business processes to dynamic changes. A survey of the classification of variation types and the underlying variation strategies is described. These variation strategies can be constructed using the form of ECA rule to allow business processes to be automatically changed on request during their execution. Since considering the benefits brought by knowledge-based technology, a variation repository can be built on valuable experience about how to handle past variation cases and hence enable the current variation problems to be resolved intelligently. In order to implement the proposed approach, variation knowledge-based flexible business process management system extends the underlying architecture of Workflow Management Coalition’s reference system. The overall architecture of the extended system is provided.