Extending BPMN for Configurable Process Modeling

Configurable process modeling provides a key approach to capture possible process variations into one (reference) model on the one hand and to retrieve individual process variants through configuration of the model on the other hand. BPMN, a standard for business process modeling and a mainstream language being widely adopted in practice, lacks the configurable modeling capability. In this paper, we propose an extension to BPMN to support configurable process modeling with a focus on control-flow perspective. Using configurable workflow net as the theoretical foundation, we formally define the semantics of the proposed extension to BPMN, its correctness-preserving conditions, and its configuration semantics. We name the resulting language Configurable BPMN, i.e. C-BPMN, and provide a running example to illustrate how C-BPMN supports configurable process modeling as well as process configuration.