A Two-tier Data-centric Framework for Flexible Business Process Management

Business process management provides a means of coordinating interactions between workers and organizations in a structured way. However, the dynamic nature of the modern business environment requires these processes are subject to an increasingly wide range of variations. Therefore, flexible approaches are needed to deal with these variations in order to maintain viable business. In this paper, we propose a two-tier data-centric framework to achieve process flexibility. Our approach is based on Business Entity, a new process modeling paradigm widely recognized in recent years. We design a process design business entity (PD entity) to include business process definitions as a part of its information, and process execution business entities (PE entities) provide the context for defining the behavior of activities in the processes. The business processes, as the PD entity data, can be modified on-the-fly and evolve naturally as the PD entity progresses through its lifecycle. We illustrate this framework with an example from the travel service industry. It shows that this framework is able to improve process flexibility, empower business users with capability of making timely process changes, and reduces the burden of managing process evolution.