Business Process flexibility supports organizations in changing their everyday work activities to remain competitive. Since much research has been done on this topic a better awareness on the current state of knowledge is needed. This paper reports the results of a systematic literature review to develop a map on Business Process flexibility with a special focus on software systems related aspects. It covers a spectrum of the state of the art from academic point of view. It includes 164 research works from the main computer science digital libraries. After an introduction into the topic the applied methodology is described. The output of the paper is in the form of schemes and reflections. Starting from the needs for Business Process flexibility, its impact on Business Process life-cycle is introduced. Successively instruments used to express and to support Business Process flexibility are presented together with related validation scenarios. In this paper we also highlight possible future research lines needing further investigations. In particular we identified room for future works in the area of languages for modeling flexibility, on-the-fly verification solutions, adaptation of Business Process running instances, and techniques for evolution recognition
Modern software systems are more and more deployed within moving and continuously changing contexts. It is not easy to consider all the possible contexts configurations/variances at priori, or it is quite cumbersome and error prone to list and program all this variability points at development time. For such a reason different research trends try to develop mechanisms to express, analyse and support the dynamic adaptation of a software system while it is running.\ud
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Business Processes show today similar characteristics. In order to keep their competitiveness and quality for products and services, organizations need to be able to adapt to changing contexts. Changes have to be reflected in the software systems supporting the corresponding organizational activities.\ud
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In this paper we report the results of a systematic literature review on Business Process Adaptation. The reviewing process lead us to consider 84 papers from the main digital libraries indexing computer science conferences and journals. From the reading and the systematic analysis of these papers we derived some research trends and challenges which have been considered relevant to be able to cover the main sources of adaptation in the definition of effective Business Processes
In order to help organizations in providing similar services without the need to structure each of them separately, this chapter presents a modeling notation that supports variability for Business Process modeling. Variability is particularly relevant for Public Administration institutions where different offices organize the provisioning of services to citizens following similar rules, and adapting them to the characteristics of the different offices. The notation and the approach are inspired to feature modeling techniques, whereas in this case features are used to represent activities of a process family that can be differently implemented and connected. The proposed approach facilitates the development of a partially specified process model in terms of a set of fragments that in a subsequent step can be connected in order to fully specify the desired control flow. The notation and the approach were implemented on the the ADOxx platform
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