Assisting Business Process Design with Configurable Process Fragments

Abstract

In recent years, many approaches have been proposed to facilitate business process design. They attempted to measure the similarity between business processes, merge business process models, mine event logs or recommend activities. In this paper, we present a merging approach that also aims at facilitating business process design. However, instead of merging business process models, we merge process fragments around a particular activity to construct a consolidated fragment for each activity. This consolidated fragment is presented as a configurable sub-process which allows process designers to overview the interactions of an activity and configure them to create business process variants according to particular requirements. The approach has been implemented as an application and tested against a large collection of business process models taken from different domains. Experimental results show that our approach produces concise and efficient configurable fragments.