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A Semantic Approach for Business Process
Model Abstraction
Sergey Smirnov 1 ,HajoA.Reijers 2 ,andMathiasWeske 1
1 Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany
{ sergey.smirnov,mathias.weske } @hpi.uni-potsdam.de
2 Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
h.a.reijers@tue.nl
Abstract. Models of business processes can easily become large and
dicult to understand. Abstraction has proven to be an effective means
to present a readable, high-level view of a business process model, by
showing aggregated activities and leaving out irrelevant details. Yet, it is
an open question how to combine activities into high-level tasks in a way
that corresponds to such actions by experienced modelers. In this paper,
an approach is presented that exploits semantic information within a
process model, beyond structural information, to decide on which activ-
ities belong to one another. In an experimental validation, we used an
industrial process model repository to compare this approach with ac-
tual modeling decisions, showing a strong correlation between the two.
As such, this paper contributes to the development of modeling support
for the application of effective process model abstraction, easing the use
of business process models in practice.
Keywords: business process modeling, model management, business
process model abstraction, activity clustering.
1
Introduction
Business process models are used within a range of organizational initiatives [19].
However, human readers are limited in their cognitive capabilities to make sense
of large and complex business process models [2,33]. One well-known way to ad-
dress this issue is by applying abstraction , the act of retaining essential properties
of a process model on a particular level of analysis while hiding insignificant pro-
cess details. Indeed, in a recent empirical investigation into the need for business
process model abstraction [32], we found that its most prominent use case is the
need for gaining a quick overview of the process. In such a situation, the user
wants to familiarize herself with a business process but has only a large process
model of many detailed activities at her disposal. To deal with such a demand,
the process model can then be displayed as a partially ordered set of coarse-
grained activities, each of which aggregates a number of lower-level activities.
As an example, an abstraction of a process model that captures the creation of
a forecasting report is shown in Fig. 1. In this figure, m is the initial model and
m a is the abstract model of the same process.
 
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