Decomposition and hierarchization of EPCs: A case study

Abstract

Nowadays, organizations utilize process model collections with several hundreds or thousands of models. To reduce model complexity, large process models are typically decomposed into smaller ones. Moreover, processes are modeled at different levels of abstraction by means of hierarchization. Although the hierarchization and decomposition concepts result in a reuse of processes and foster a better understanding, their applications can lead to various syntactic and semantic issues concerning the concatenation of the resulting processes. In this article, the decomposition of event-driven process chains (EPCs) is examined by an analysis of an established reference model as well as the hierarchization concept. Furthermore, a classification of the identified issues will be presented. The awareness about these issues can be used to avoid modeling weaknesses of new models or for the evaluation of other (reference) models. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.