Object-sensitive action patterns in process model repositories

Abstract

Organizations maintain large repositories of business process models. While maintenance and management of these repositories are challenging, they also offer opportunities when used as a knowledge base systematically. For instance, repositories can be leveraged to provide modeling support and, therefore, help to assure the consistency of newly created models with the existing ones. In the previous work we have introduced action patterns as reusable blocks of process models that can be derived from a model repository. In this paper we advance the initial results interpreting the action concept as a composition of a verb and a business object. The subsequently identified action pattern types allow for fine-grained modeling support. We evaluate the novel concepts and compare them to the established action patterns using as a benchmark the SAP Reference Model, the real world process model collection. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.