Design for Reuse in Business Process: Method and Experiments

When modeling a business process or when updating an existing one, a business analyzer is available to reuse business parts already operational. Indeed, to minimize time of creation and to reduce cost and complexity, a solution can be given by the reuse of some existing business parts. The need to reuse of some business parts to fulfill companies’ requirements leads to the need of extracting business fragments from the business process model. The aim of this paper is to propose a method which enables to obtain a business fragments from a business process. The main idea is to decompose a business process into small fragments. These fragments have the ability to be reused for building a new business process or updating an existing one. The method the authors propose is presented as guidelines that allow the decomposition of business process to enable having a reusable business fragments, their method is based on variability in business process modeled in BPMN. The method also takes into account the business goal of each extracted fragment. The proposed method is presented as a process along with a meta-model to facilitate the understanding of the concepts related to BPMN. An algorithm that illustrates their method is also presented in order to use it for a further implementation. The paper also includes users’ experiments to validate our method.