Propagating changes between aligned process models

  • Authors:

  • Matthias Weidlich;Jan Mendling;Mathias Weske

  • Affiliations:

  • Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Technion City, 32000 Haifa, Israel;Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Augasse 2-6, A-1090 Vienna, Austria;Hasso-Plattner-Institute, University of Potsdam, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Str. 2-3, D-14482 Potsdam, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Systems and Software
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

There is a wide variety of drivers for business process modelling initiatives, reaching from organisational redesign to the development of information systems. Consequently, a common business process is often captured in multiple models that overlap in content due to serving different purposes. Business process management aims at flexible adaptation to changing business needs. Hence, changes of business processes occur frequently and have to be incorporated in the respective process models. Once a process model is changed, related process models have to be updated accordingly, despite the fact that those process models may only be loosely coupled. In this article, we introduce an approach that supports change propagation between related process models. Given a change in one process model, we leverage the behavioural abstraction of behavioural profiles for corresponding activities in order to determine a change region in another model. Our approach is able to cope with changes in pairs of models that are not related by hierarchical refinement and show behavioural inconsistencies. We evaluate the applicability of our approach with two real-world process model collections. To this end, we either deduce change operations from different model revisions or rely on synthetic change operations.