Semantic Variability Modeling in Business Processes: A Comparative Study

Business Process Management (BPM) is an approach that aligns information systems (IT view) with business processes (Business view). Both the dynamic environment of business and the fast changes in requirements have created the need to reuse business processes in order to gain in cost and time. To enhance reuse in BPM, significant research efforts have been made on the development of methods and languages in order to support variability modeling. However, there is no single standard for modeling variability in configurable process models. Each modeling language integrating variability proposes its own method for representing variability, and different representations are used to express the same variability concepts. In addition to that, human intervention is still mandatory in order to create, configure and evolve configurable process models. With semantic annotations and the usage of ontology, these tasks could be automated. In this paper, we propose a comparative study to assess variability modeling approaches in software engineering domains, which include software product line engineering, services engineering and process engineering. This comparative study is conducted in terms of semantics use.