Research And Realization: A Software Model To Support Business Process Variability

With the continuous development of business process management, the variability of business process had become a domain of the business management research. Not only had it the ability to describe the enterprise business process precisely, but also to adapt itself to environment and the development of enterprise business. The research's target is to enhance the resilience and competitiveness. Around of it, the domain of information technology and economic management had proposed the variability of business process, done some exploratory works, and developed some theories and methods to support the research's target.There were three research directions in the domain of business process variability: the first was based on the business process modeling. It needed consider the future variability at the beginning of analyzing and modeling the business process; the second was based on the implementation scheme of the model. When the business process had deployed, the software architecture had the ability to adjust the process structure; the third was software adaptability research, which combined some artificial intelligence technology to enable the model had the ability to analysis the state of the environment, and to adjust the process structure. Although had it achieved fruitful achievement during the three stages of the business process variability, but the definition of process model was complicated, and the business experts couldn't adjust the process structure simplify.In this paper, according to the business process modeling direction, we had summarized some kinds of business process changes and some atomic changes, which based on the work that we had proposed a process model to support the process variability. This paper had given the definition of the model's elements, pointed the key elements to achieve the variability, and proposed the methods to adjust the process's structure. We had used the Pi-calculus to prove the model's reasonableness. Next, we had discussed how to achieve the model by using Web Service technology, analyzed model's elements how to map to the WS-BPEL's elements. At last, according our research background (IPVita), we had discussed how to use the model to describe the business process, and how to adjust the process structure to achieve the business process variability.Currently, there are some deficiencies in our process model:at first, the process model still at the theoretical stage, the second is not clearly to define the scope of applying the process model, the third is not precisely to achieve the message passing mechanisms. After summing up the deficiencies of the process model, we had pointed the research directions to successors.