Managing Business Process Variability in Artifact-centric BPM Master Thesis

Artifact-centric process modelling is a promising technology to manage business operations. The Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) life-cycle is a declarative approach to specify artifacts and their lifecycles. Currently there’s no approach to manage process variability in the field of artifact-centric business process models. Existing variability management approaches are designed especially for activity-centric process models. This master thesis develops a process variability management approach in an artifact-centric paradigm. The approach adapts and extends the Provop approach by carefully considering the characteristics of artifact-centric process models. By constructing a process family meta-model, we have also identified the variation points and the elements that can be reused. The approach provides stakeholders who are involved in process design with good efficiency, understandability and maintainability.