On the suitability of aggregated and configurable business process models

Abstract

Reference models play an important role for specifying knowledge about a certain business domain that is general enough to be applicable for a wide set of companies. Still, it is understood that reference models need to be adapted in order to also reflect individual characteristics of a company. This adaptation turns out to be quite laborintense. Concepts such as configurable process modeling languages have been proposed to simplify this adaptation. Competing languages have been designed to facilitate the actual act of adapting reference models, namely configurable EPCs (C-EPCs) and aggregated EPCs (aEPCs). In this paper we discuss the ease of use of these languages from an analytical perspective. Based on a mapping from C-EPCs to aEPCs we identify complexity issues and comparative advantages. It turns out that C-EPCs appear to be better suited to capture complex configuration options in a compact way. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.