Composition of Semantic Process Fragments to Domain-Related Process Families

Efficient and effective process management is considered as key success factor for competitiveness of enterprises in an increasingly complex and closely connected environment. Today, there exists a plentitude of IT-tools that support modeling, execution, monitoring, and even flexible change of processes. Though, most process management solutions offer possibilities for reusing workflow components, development of new process models is still a cost and time consuming task. Either common process knowledge is scattered among a growing amount of process models or it is divided into unspecific components, the interrelations of which are difficult to manage. This problem becomes even worse considering potential variations of workflows. In the SPOT project, we adapted the feature modeling approach in order to represent enterprise-specific process knowledge in the form of process families. Process families consist of semantically enriched process fragments and enable the composition of business processes that conform to domain-related rules and regulations.