Automated generation of variants in business process families based on the Common Variability Language (CVL)

Abstract

Business processes are carried out to achieve business objectives within an organization. Sometimes, such processes accept variants depending on specific business requirements. Several proposals have emerged to deal with the variability of business processes with focus on the modeling of process families with variants, avoiding modeling each variant separately, which implies duplication and maintenance of the common parts. One of these proposals is the Common Variability Language (CVL), which allows to represent variability transparently in a host language. Deriving a process variant from the definition of a process family is a central and complex task, which is done manually in most of the approaches. The aim of this article is to explore the use of CVL together with the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN 2.0) for modeling business process families, and the use of Model Driven Engineering (MDE) techniques for the automatic generation of process variants. We also present a graphical tool supporting these ideas and a qualitative evaluation of the variability approach by using the VIVACE framework.