Business process models are used within a range of organizational initiatives. However, each and every stakeholder demands for a different perspective on a business process. This leads to creation of multiple process models capturing the very same business process. Keeping such models in sync is a challenging task within an ever changing business environment.
Business process model abstraction, or BPMA, emerged as an operation on a business process model preserving essential process properties and leaving out insignificant details in order to retain information relevant for a particular purpose. In this way BPMA allows reducing the number of stored process models and facilitates process model management. BPMA has been addressed by several researchers. The focus of their studies has been on particular use cases and model transformation techniques supporting these use cases.
This talk systematically approaches the problem of business process model abstraction. It investigates the current industry demand in BPMA and provides a consistent BPMA formalization. Focusing on one particular BPMA use case we elaborate on novel model transformation operations supporting it. This talk not only discusses the control flow transformation aspects, but explores how semantically related activities can be discovered in process models–the challenge barely explored in the related work.
Research questions addressed in the talk:
1. Which business process model abstraction use cases exist?
2. Which process model transformations support the identified business process model abstraction use cases?
3. Which properties do process model transformations enabling business process model abstraction have?