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model part is, although it is evidently not part of any higher-level model. Since
in many industrial settings entire process models
themselves
carry names that
convey indications of the business procedure that they capture, the underlying
process model naming conventions are a valuable source of inspiration on how
to name model parts. Our contribution is an automatic approach for generating
name suggestions for a process model based on its events and activities, which is
applicable to process model fragments as well. From a practical point of view, this
approach paves the way to an integrated and automated abstraction of process
models, in pursuit of the communication advantages associated with skilfully
decomposed process models [5].
Against this background, the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses
the problem of assigning a meaningful name to a process and identifies a list
of naming strategies in models from practice. Section 3 describes the different
phases of our approach to generate process model names. Section 4 discusses
our contribution in the light of related work. Finally, Section 5 summarizes the
findings and provides an outlook on future research.
2 Naming of Process Models in Practice
Before considering an automatic approach for generating process model names,
we have to understand how modelers assign names to process models. Guidelines
exist on how activity names should be composed, e.g. [6] suggest a verb-object
style putting the action first followed by the corresponding business object. While
such guidelines advocate a certain
grammatical
structure of naming, they do
not deal with its
content
by refraining to mention how to choose a particular
verb or business object in the name of the model. In Section 2.1, we introduce
Event-Driven Process Chains (EPCs), the process modeling language that we
consider in this paper, and discuss directions for choosing a name for a model.
In Section 2.2, we inspect three sets of process models from practice in order to
identify strategies of naming. These strategies provide us with the foundation to
automatically generate names for a fragment or the whole EPC.
2.1 Event-Driven Process Chains
An EPC is a graph-structured process model, which consists of different types
of nodes: functions, events, and connectors. Functions define the business activ-
ities that have to be executed while events define the pre-conditions and post-
conditions for starting a function. Figure 1 shows an example EPC from the SAP
reference model with two functions (rounded boxes) and four events (hexagons).
Functions and events are connected via control flow arcs in an alternating way.
Complex routing is defined using connectors (circles). In the example, we observe
an OR-split connector (symbol
) creating two end events. An EPC has at least
one start event (no incoming arc) and at least one end event (no outgoing arc).
To illustrate the naming problem addressed in this paper, we re-consider the
example EPC from Figure 1. One approach for naming the entire process would
be to consider the different activities of the model. The two functions relate
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