This paper introduces the concept of process variants in process-aware information systems (PAIS) during the design-time phase, where multiple variants of a single process must be specified. Today's organizations have to manage multiple variants of a given process, such as multiple order processes or payment processes for a specific product or service they offer. Traditional business process management tools lack in adequately capture and represent explicitly these variants. Hence, for more than a decade an array of approaches have been proposed to tackle this gap. A reference or customizable process model has been introduced to model these variants collections in a way that each variant could be derived by inserting/removing an activity according to a process context. This survey reviews current literature by providing an overview of meta-modelling approaches that have been extended in order to capture the variations of business processes. Moreover, we give a comparative analysis of these approaches based on different criteria we identified from the inventory activity, providing insights into their strengths and limitations. This paper concludes that current approaches to process variants meta-modelling provide a comprehensive view of the conceptual level of process variants and the control-flow process perspective. While some approaches go a step further by capturing variability in resources or specialization among activities/processes.

翻译：本文在设计阶段引入了过程感知信息系统（PAIS）中过程变体的概念，此时必须规范单个过程的多个变体。当今组织需要管理给定过程的多个变体，例如针对其提供的特定产品或服务的多个订单流程或支付流程。传统业务流程管理工具在充分捕获和明确表示这些变体方面存在不足。因此，过去十多年来涌现出一系列方法以填补这一空白。参考模型或可定制过程模型被引入以建模这些变体集合，使得每个变体均可根据过程上下文通过插入/删除活动来派生。本综述通过概述为捕获业务流程变体而扩展的元建模方法，对现有文献进行梳理。此外，我们基于从盘点活动中识别的不同标准对这些方法进行对比分析，揭示了其优势与局限性。本文得出结论：当前过程变体元建模方法在概念层面和流程控制视角上对过程变体提供了全面视图，部分方法还进一步捕获了资源变异性或活动/过程的专业化特征。