A control-flow pattern based horizontal business process model transformation approach

Abstract

Due to company mergers and business to business interoperability, there is a need for model transformations in the area of business process modeling to facilitate scenarios like model integration and model synchronization. General model transformation approaches do not consider the special properties of business process models and horizontal transformation scenarios. Since different business process modeling languages use different modeling elements and syntax constraints, a business process may have veiy different representations in different languages. So in many cases it is not easy to transform business process models correctly only using an element-2-element mapping. In order to solve this problem and improve the correction rate of horizontal business process model transformation, in this work we propose CP-BPMT(Control-flow Pattern based Business Process Model Transformation), a horizontal business process model transformation approach in which the operation granularity has been increased from model elements to model fragments illustrating certain control-flow patterns. CP-BPMT is feasible in practice and it can generate transformation results better than element-based approaches. In order to illustrate CP-BPMT approach, a UML-AD2YAWL case study is conducted. © 2013 Asian Network for Scientific Information.