Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Computers and Information - Department of Information Systems

Nowadays, the business environment is constantly changing. So, enterprises need to be agile in order to react to internal and external changes to compete in the long term. Most of the business is governed by a set of business processes which can be considered as the heart of any business. A business process may be addressed by a set of variants in order to meet different customer{u2019}s requirements, e.g. multiple variants for a vacation request process. Each process variant constitutes an adjustment of a reference process model to specific needs or requirements based on the context. Variability management of process models has many issues to deal with such as redundant process variants, an inconsistency of process variants, and huge modeling efforts. Additionally, current approaches such as provop, C-EPCs, and PMMs are not supporting data and organizational perspectives of the business process. In this thesis, we aim at proposing a context-based framework for managing the generation of process model variants in order to respond to changes in requirements at the design phase of the business process management lifecycle. The framework is based on aspects from both organizational and data perspectives of the business process. Moreover, the framework recommends the most suitable configurations for process model variants based on the case in hand. This thesis starts with the study and the observation of existing approaches for managing the variability in process models. Moreover, we develop an interactive tool to support the idea of generating context-based process model variants due to changes in requirements. The proposed framework is applied to a set of real cases to demonstrate its strengths factors and weakness points in order to be validated

Issued also as CD