Extending Fragment-Based Case Management with State Variables

摘要

Modeling business processes has become standard among companies to efficiently organize their business operations. Case Management approaches have been proposed to overcome the limited flexibility of traditional business process languages as BPMN when it comes to supporting knowledge-intensive processes. One of such approaches is Chimera, in which business scenarios are captured by a set of process fragments, a domain model, and object lifecycles. When modeling the real-world ITIL incident handling process, we observed that although Chimera is in general well-suited to capture this process, it misses the functionality to restore states of data objects. Such functionality is useful to undo errors of the case manager during process execution or to perform planned rollbacks. Therefore, we extend Chimera with state variables that memorize previous data states, making it possible to restore those states in the further course of the case. Our extension is validated using the real-world incident handling process.