Extracting Features From Process Variants in Case Management

TL;DR

This paper presents a method to extract reusable features from process variants in case management, enabling more efficient design and improved quality of complex artifact-centric processes.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach for extracting and composing features from process variants, facilitating easier modification and better process quality.

Findings

Features enable efficient process variant design

Process variants can be derived by composing extracted features

Quality of process variants improves through known modifications

Abstract

Case Management supports knowledge workers in performing knowledge-intensive processes in a flexible way. An essential ingredient of Case Management are template processes that are modified for a specific case to suit the context of that case. Modifying templates results in many different yet related process variants. However, modifying a template is time consuming and may lead to errors. This paper defines an approach to extract fragments, called features, from artifact-centric process variants in case management. By composing the extracted features, the input variants and other process variants can be derived. This way, complex artifact-centric process variants can be designed more efficiently and their quality improves, since well-known modifications are applied.