On the Automatic Labeling of Process Models - Advanced Information Systems Engineering - page 510

On the Automatic Labeling of Process Models

Henrik Leopold 1 , Jan Mendling 1 , and Hajo A. Reijers 2

1 Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin, Germany
{ henrik.leopold,jan.mendling } @wiwi.hu-berlin.de
2 Eindhoven University of Technology
PO Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands
[e-mail]

Abstract. Process models are essential tools for managing, understand-
ing and changing business processes. Yet, from a user perspective they
can quickly become too complex to deal with. Abstraction - aggregat-
ing detailed fragments into more coarse-grained ones - has proven to be
a valuable technique to simplify the view on a process model. Various
techniques that automate the decision of which model fragments to ag-
gregate have been defined and validated by recent research, but their
application is hampered by the lack of abilities to generate meaningful
names for such aggregated parts. In this paper, we address this problem
by investigating naming strategies for individual model fragments and
process models as a whole. Our contribution is an automatic naming
approach that builds on the linguistic analysis of process models from
industry.

1 Introduction

Business process management is a concept for enabling companies to cope with
the increasing dynamics and challenges in a competitive business environment.
A key element of process management is to map business processes to mod-
els in order to leverage understanding, analysis and improvement of processes.
Today, many larger enterprises possess an extensive documentation of their busi-
ness process in terms of several thousandmodels,oftenatasignificantlevelof
detail [1]. In order to make large and detailed models easier to understand, re-
cent research has developed automatic abstraction techniques to generate coarse-
grained model parts from more detailed ones [2,3].
The essential idea of abstraction is to identify fragments of a model that
can be aggregated into a single activity. While this is valuable to reduce the
structural complexity of a large model, existing techniques do not address how a
suitable name for an aggregated part can be established. When using abstraction
to render a high-level view of a process model for a human reader, which is the
most popular use case for abstraction [4], this is troublesome. In this paper, we
address the naming problem of aggregated model parts from the perspective of
naming a whole process model . A complete process model is as much a collection
of activities with mutual control-flow dependencies as an aggregated process