Variability in Artifact-Centric Process Modeling: The Hetero-Homogeneous Approach

Today's dynamic business environment demands from companies variable and flexible processes. Rather than imposing a single fixed process, process models must account for the variability of real-world business problems. Many companies are hierarchically organized with top-down decision making processes. On the one hand, company policies and legal regulations often require compliance with standard process models prescribed by higher-level management. On the other hand, lower-level employees should be flexible within the prescribed boundaries. In this paper, we propose a hetero-homogeneous approach to modeling process variability. We employ the multi-level business artifact (MBA) in order to represent within a single object the homogeneous schema of an abstraction hierarchy of processes. We employ multilevel concretization for the introduction of heterogeneities into sub-hierarchies which eomply with the homogeneous global schema.

Keywords: Business Artifact, Multilevel Modeling, Process Variability, Process Flexibility