Defining adaptation constraints for business process variants

In current dynamic business environment, it has been argued that certain characteristics of ad-hocism in business processes are desirable. Such business processes typically have a very large number of instances, where design decisions for each process instance may be made at runtime. In these cases, predictability and repetitiveness cannot be counted upon, as the complete process knowledge used to define the process model only becomes available at the time after a specific process instance has been instantiated. The basic premise is that for a class of business processes it is possible to specify a small number of essential constraints at design time, but allow for a large number of execution possibilities at runtime. The objective of this paper is to conceptualise a set of constraints for process adaptation at instance level. Based on a comprehensive modelling framework, business requirements can be transformed to a set of minimal constraints, and the support for specification of process constraints andchniques to ensure constraint quality are developed. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.