  With the continuous development of business process management technology,
the increasing business process models are usually owned by large enterprises.
In large enterprises, different stakeholders may modify the same business
process model. In order to better manage the changeability of processes, they
adopt configurable business process models to manage process variants. However,
the process variants will vary with the change in enterprise business demands.
Therefore, it is necessary to explore the co-evolution of the process variants
so as to effectively manage the business process family. To this end, a novel
framework for co-evolution between business process variants through a
configurable process model is proposed in this work. First, the mapping
relationship between process variants and configurable models is standardized
in this study. A series of change operations and change propagation operations
between process variants and configurable models are further defined for
achieving propagation. Then, an overall algorithm is proposed for achieving
co-evolution of process variants. Next, a prototype is developed for managing
change synchronization between process variants and configurable process
models. Finally, the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed process
change propagation method are verified based on experiments on two business
process datasets. The experimental results show that our approach implements
the co-evolution of process variants with high accuracy and efficiency.
