Patterns for Discussing and Modelling Variability in Business Processes

Expressing variability in graphical process models can lead to large and complicated models even for expressing rather simple situations. However, expressing variability in process models is important in many processes. During the execution of a process, it is not uncommon that knowledge workers can decide for additional steps, change the execution order or skip a task.

In this paper, we propose a set of business process variability patterns to express those situations. When communicating with business experts, the patterns can be used as building blocks which serve as placeholder for syntactically well-defined (but more complicated) model fragments in a formal language such as BPMN or CMMN.

Those building bloc ks can be used for communication and later be transformed into a formal modelling language. We believe that the patterns can be useful for supporting the communication between process analysts and stakeholders who are not familiar with formal process modeling languages. If necessary, the informal models that are created in a lightweight modeling language can later be transformed into more formal models.