COMPRO: A Methodological Approach for Business Process Contextualisation

Context-awareness has emerged as a new perspective for business process modelling. Business processes are strongly influenced by context, the environment where they are executed, and thus context should not be ignored when modelling them. This calls for new approaches that facilitate contextualisation, i.e. identification and representation of the way context influences a business process. In addition, detailed methodological guidance for correct business process contextualisation should be provided. However, existing works on context-aware business process modelling do not deal with these challenges. This paper addresses them by presenting COMPRO, a methodological approach for business process contextualisation. Starting from an initial business process model, context is analysed in order to discover its relevant variations and specify their effect on a business process. Our approach helps process designers to adequately specify context variants and business process variants that accommodate them. Our ultimate goal is to guarantee the correct design of business processes that fit their context. In addition, we report initial results about COMPRO application and evaluation.