Fragment-based version management for repositories of business process models

  • Authors:

  • Chathura C. Ekanayake;Marcello La Rosa;Arthur H. M. Ter Hofstede;Marie-Christine Fauvet

  • Affiliations:

  • Queensland University of Technology, Australia;Queensland University of Technology, Australia;Queensland University of Technology, Australia and Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands;University of Grenoble, France

  • Venue:
  • OTM'11 Proceedings of the 2011th Confederated international conference on On the move to meaningful internet systems - Volume Part I
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

As organizations reach higher levels of Business ProcessManagement maturity, they tend to accumulate large collections of processmodels. These repositories may contain thousands of activities and be managed by different stakeholders with varying skills and responsibilities. However, while being of great value, these repositories induce high management costs. Thus, it becomes essential to keep track of the various model versions as they may mutually overlap, supersede one another and evolve over time. We propose an innovative versioning model, and associated storage structure, specifically designed to maximize sharing across process models and process model versions, reduce conflicts in concurrent edits and automatically handle controlled change propagation. The focal point of this technique is to version single process model fragments, rather than entire process models. Indeed empirical evidence shows that real-life process model repositories have numerous duplicate fragments. Experiments on two industrial datasets confirm the usefulness of our technique.