V.: A qualitative comparison of approaches supporting business process variability

Abstract. The increasing adoption of Process-Aware Information Sys-tems, together with the reuse of process knowledge, has led to the emer-gence of process model repositories with large process families, i.e., col-lections of related process model variants. For managing such related model collections two types of approaches exist. While behavioral ap-proaches take supersets of variants and derive a process variant by hiding and blocking process elements, structural approaches take a base process model as input and derive a process variant by applying a set of change operations to it. However, at the current stage no framework for assess-ing these approaches exists and it is not yet clear which approach should be better used and under which circumstances. Therefore, to give first insights about this issue, this work compares both approaches in terms of understandability of the produced process model artifacts, which is fundamental for the management of process families and the reuse of their contained process fragments. In addition, the comparison can serve as theoretical basis for conducting experiments as well as for fostering the development of tools managing business process variability.