Ontology-Driven Process Specialization

Business process design is an important activity for the planning and analysis of information systems that support the organization's business processes. Our goal is to help business analysts produce detailed models of the business processes that best reflect the needs of their organizations. To this end, we propose to, a) leverage the best practices in terms of a catalog of generic business processes, and b) provide analysts with tools to customize those processes by generating, on-demand, new process variants around automatically identified process variation points. We use business patterns from the Resource Event Agent ontology to identify variation points, and to codify the model transformations inherent in the generation of the process variants. We developed a prototype, showing the computational feasibility of the approach. Early feedback from a case study with three Business Process Management (BPM) experts validated the relevance of the variation points, and the correctness of corresponding transformations, within the context of key Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) processes. In this paper, we summarize the approach and report of the results of a larger experiment, gaining insights into the strengths and weaknesses of our approach, and suggesting avenues for improvement.