An automation support for creating configurable process models

Abstract

Configurable process models are constructed via the aggregation of several process models. Manual creation of configurable process models is tedious, time consuming and error prone task. We propose in this paper an automation support for creating these models. The contribution of this paper is a merging algorithm for integrating a set of process variants into a single configurable process model. This integrated process model should (i) subsume the behaviours of all original models, (ii) ensure a trace back of the origin of each element and (iii) derive any of the input models by means of configuration and individualization. Existing solutions either fail in respecting all these requirements or allow for merging only pairs of process models. However, our algorithm allows for merging a set of process models at once. This algorithm has been implemented and tested over a set of different process variants. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.