Flexible Process Variant Binding in Information Systems with Software Product Line Engineering

Different organisations often run similar digitised business processes to achieve their business goals. However, organisations often need to slightly adapt the business processes implemented in an information system in order to adopt them. Various approaches have been proposed to manage variants in process models. While these approaches mainly deal with control flow variability, in previous work we introduced an approach to manage implementation variants of digitised business processes. In this context Software Product Line (SPL) Engineering was applied to manage a set of common core artefacts including a process model from which Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS) can be derived, which differ in the implementation of their process activities. % substitute the implementation of activities of a business process. When deriving a PAIS, implementations are selected for each process activity and then included in the PAIS at compilation time. One challenge that has not yet been solved is giving users of digitised business processes the option of selecting several features at runtime, i.e. selecting multiple activity implementations at runtime. This paper extends our previous work by not only allowing for the selection of activity implementations at compile time, but also at start time and runtime. Consequently, it becomes possible to defer the decision as to which features should be selected to start time and runtime. Furthermore, multiple implementations of a particular activity may be selected and executed concurrently. As another challenge different organisation may want to collect and base their decision on different information in a digitised business process. Consequently, the presented approach also allows customising the input and output data of activities when deriving a PAIS for a specific organisation.