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Information Systems Group, University of Twente, The Netherlands {d.mueller, m.u.reichert}@ewi.utwente.nl 2 Dept. GR/EPD, DaimlerChrysler AG Group Research & Advanced Engineering, Germany [email protected]

Abstract. In the engineering domain, the development of complex products (e.g., cars) necessitates the coordination of thousands of (sub-) processes. One of the biggest challenges for process management systems is to support the modeling, monitoring and maintenance of the many interdependencies between these sub-processes. The resulting process structures are large and can be characterized by a strong relationship with the assembly of the product; i.e., the sub-processes to be coordinated can be related to the different product components. So far, subprocess coordination has been mainly accomplished manually, resulting in high efforts and inconsistencies. IT support is required to utilize the information about the product and its structure for deriving, coordinating and maintaining such data-driven process structures. In this paper, we introduce the COREPRO framework for the data-driven modeling of large process structures. The approach reduces modeling efforts significantly and provides mechanisms for maintaining data-driven process structures.

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Introduction

Enterprises are increasingly demanding IT support for their business processes. One challenge emerging in this context is to coordinate the execution of large and long-running processes (e.g., related to car development). Engineering processes, for instance, often consist of numerous concurrently executed, interdependent sub-processes. The reasons for this fragmentation are manifold: Typically, these sub-processes are related to different (data) objects (e.g., product components), enacted by different organizational units (e.g., dealing with the testing or releasing of single components), and controlled by different IT systems. We denote such correlated sub-processes as process structure. These process structures have in common that changes (e.g., removing a subprocess or adding a dependency between sub-processes) as well as real-world exceptions (e.g., abnormal termination of a sub-process) occur frequently and 

This work has been funded by Daimler AG Group Research and has been conducted in the COREPRO (COnfiguration based RElease PROcesses) project.

R. Meersman and Z. Tari et al. (Eds.): OTM 2007, Part I, LNCS 4803, pp. 131–149, 2007. c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007 

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D. Müller, M. Reichert, and J. Herbst

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