Comparing process models in the BPMN 2.0 XML format

Abstract

Comparing business process models is one of the most significant challenges for business and systems analysts. The complexity of the problem is explained by the fact there is a lack of tools that can be used for comparing business process models. Also there is no universally accepted standard for modeling them. EPC, YAWL, BPEL, XPDL and BPMN are only a small fraction of available notations that have found acceptance among developers. Every process modeling standard has its advantages and disadvantages, but almost all of them comprise an XML schema, which defines process serialization rules. Due to the fact that XML naturally represents hierarchical and reference structure of business process models, these models can be compared using their XML representations. In this paper we propose a generic comparison approach, which is applicable to XML representations of business process models. Using this approach we have developed a tool, which currently supports BPMN 2.0 [1] (one of the most popular business process modeling notations), but can be extended to support other business process modeling standards.