CMMN-Based Modeling and Customization of Declarative Business Process Families

A process family represents a set of processes with common aspects and variable parts based on an organization’s specific business requirements. It can be expressed using concrete modeling languages and then customized at design time into a specific process variant to enact according to particular configuration requirements. Most process family modeling proposals focus on imperative processes, such as extensions of the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard. Some proposals also focus on declarative languages that express more flexible process families. However, no proposal focuses on the Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) standard, a declarative proposal that complements BPMN for expressing hybrid processes. In this article, we study declarative process family languages, and we introduce CMMNext, an approach for its modeling and automatic customization based on CMMN. We also present a supporting tool and compare CMMNext’s potential concerning other declarative proposals.