Business process model abstraction based on behavioral profiles

Abstract

A variety of drivers for process modeling efforts, from low-level service orchestration to high-level decision support, results in many process models describing one business process. Depending on the modeling purpose, these models differ with respect to the model granularity. Business process model abstraction (BPMA) emerged as a technique that given a process model delivers a high-level process representation containing more coarse-grained activities and overall ordering constraints between them. Thereby, BPMA reduces the number of models capturing the same business process on different abstraction levels. In this paper, we present an abstraction approach that derives control flow dependencies for activities of an abstract model, once the groups of related activities are selected for aggregation. In contrast to the existing work, we allow for arbitrary activity groupings. To this end, we employ the behavioral profile notion that captures behavioral characteristics of a process model. Based on the original model and the activity grouping, we compute a new behavioral profile used for synthesis of the abstract process model. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.