Declarative Enhancement Framework for Business Processes ⋆ Heerko Groefsema, Pavel Bulanov, and Marco Aiello Distributed Systems Group, Johann Bernoulli Institute, University of Groningen, Nijenborgh 9, 9747 AG Groningen, The Netherlands {h.groefsema, p.bulanov, m.aiello}@rug.nl http://www.cs.rug.nl/ds/ Abstract. While Business Process Management (BPM) was designed to support rigid production processes, nowadays it is also at the core of more flexible business applications and has established itself firmly in the service world. Such a shift calls for new techniques. In this paper, we introduce a variability framework for BPM which utilizes temporal logic formalisms to represent the essence of a process, leaving other choices open for later customization or adaption. The goal is to solve two major issues of BPM: enhancing reusability and flexibility. Furthermore, by enriching the process modelling environment with graphical elements, the complications of temporal logic are hidden from the user. Keywords: BPM, Variability, Temporal Logic, e-Government 1 Introduction The world of Business Process Management (BPM) has gone through some major changes [4] due, among other things, to the advent of Web services and Service-orientation; providing opportunities as well as challenges [2]. Variability is an abstraction and management method that addresses a number of the open issues. In the domain of software engineering, variability refers to the possibility of changes in software products and models [13]. When this is introduced to the BPM domain, it indicates that parts of a business process remain either open to change, or not fully defined, in order to support different versions of the same process depending on the intended use or execution context, see for instance our survey [3]. Since BPM is moving into more fields of business and rely on autonomous remote building blocks, a need for flexible processes has arisen. Today, when a number of closely related processes are in existence, they are either described in different process models or in one large model using intricate branching routes, resulting in redundancy issues in case of the former and maintainability and readability issues in the case of the latter [14, 3]. When applied to process models, variability introduces solutions to both issues by offering support for reusability and flexibility. ⋆ The research is supported by the NWO SaS-LeG project, http://www.sas-leg.net, contract No. 638.001.207.