Towards a process patterns based approach for promoting adaptability in configurable process models

Reference process modeling approach has been proposed in order to provide a generic solution for reuse in business process management. These models are intended to be adapted by different organizations to respond to new requirements. As a result of this adaptation, a set of variants of the reference process model must be managed. In this context, configurable solutions have been developed to manage variability by integrating all possible configurations. However, enterprises are involved in competitive and complex environments which impose them to often adapt their configurable process models to deal with the increasing globalisation. Therefore, configurable process models should evolve over time in terms of activities, resources and data to meet new needs. In this paper, we propose a process patterns based approach to guide designers in evolving configurable process models at design time as a first step of our contribution to provide an automated support for evolving configurable process models. The presentation of our process patterns system is limited in this paper to the Activity Insertion Process Pattern.