VARIATION KNOWLEDGE-BASED APPROACH TOHANDLING BUSINESS PROCESS CHANGES

摘要

The increase in interest in supporting organization to gain arncompetitive edge in a rapidly changing market environmentrnnecessitates considering means to handle business processrnchanges. This paper is focused on approaches of flexiblernbusiness process management and attempts to addressrnvariation issue encountered in adapting run-time businessrnprocesses to dynamic changes. A survey of the classificationrnof variation types and the underlying variation strategies isrndescribed. These variation strategies can be constructedrnusing the form of ECA rule to allow business processes tornbe automatically changed on request during their execution.rnSince considering the benefits brought by knowledge-basedrntechnology, a variation repository can be built on valuablernexperience about how to handle past variation cases andrnhence enable the current variation problems to be resolvedrnintelligently. In order to implement the proposed approach,rnvariation knowledge-based flexible business processrnmanagement system extends the underlying architecture ofrnWorkflow Management Coalition's reference system. Thernoverall architecture of the extended system is provided.