Organizations use business process management systems to automate processes that they use to perform tasks or interact with customers. However, several variants of the same business process may exist due to, e.g., mergers, customer-tailored services, diverse market segments, or distinct legislation across borders. As a result, reliable support for process variability has been identified as a necessity. In this article, we introduce the concept of declarative process families to support process variability and present a procedure to formally verify whether a business process model is part of a specified process family. The procedure allows to identify potential parts in the process that violate the process family. By introducing the concept of process families, we allow organizations to deviate from their prescribed processes using normal process model notation and automatically verify if such a deviation is allowed. To demonstrate the applicability of the approach, a simple example process is used that describes several variants of a car rental process which is required to adhere to several process families. Moreover, to support the proposed procedure, we present a tool that allows business processes, specified as Petri nets, to be verified against their declarative process families using the NuSMV2 model checker.

中文翻译：

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通过声明性流程系列支持业务流程的可变性


组织使用业务流程管理系统来自动化执行任务或与客户交互的流程。然而，由于合并、客户定制服务、不同的市场细分或不同的跨境立法等原因，同一业务流程可能存在多种变体。因此，对过程可变性的可靠支持已被认为是必要的。在本文中，我们引入了声明性流程族的概念来支持流程可变性，并提出了一个过程来正式验证业务流程模型是否是指定流程族的一部分。该过程允许识别流程中违反流程族的潜在部分。通过引入流程族的概念，我们允许组织使用正常流程模型符号偏离其规定的流程，并自动验证是否允许这种偏差。为了演示该方法的适用性，使用一个简单的示例流程来描述汽车租赁流程的几种变体，该流程需要遵守多个流程系列。此外，为了支持建议的过程，我们提供了一个工具，允许使用 NuSMV2 模型检查器根据其声明性流程系列来验证指定为 Petri 网的业务流程。