Business Process Adaptation Based on Process Variants

An extensional method for existing business processes is proposed to adapt new environments based on process variants in this paper. The core processes describing maximal commonalities of process variants are introduced according to inheritance relation. Then, extensional business processes are defined based on the core processes. The algorithms of the core processes and extensional business are given and proved. And the soundness of two kinds of processes is justified. An example shows that extensional business processes can adapt to the new environment better than the original process.