Title
Modelling Families of Business Process Variants: A Decomposition Driven Method.
Abstract
Business processes usually do not exist as singular entities that can be managed in isolation, but rather as families of business process variants. When modelling such families of variants, analysts are confronted with the choice between modelling each variant separately, or modelling multiple or all variants in a single model. Modelling each variant separately leads to a proliferation of models that share common parts, resulting in redundancies and inconsistencies. Meanwhile, modelling all variants together leads to less but more complex models, thus hindering on comprehensibility. This paper introduces a method for modelling families of process variants that addresses this trade-off. The key tenet of the method is to alternate between steps of decomposition (breaking down processes into sub-processes) and deciding which parts should be modelled together and which ones should be modelled separately. We have applied the method to two case studies: one concerning the consolidation of existing process models, and another dealing with green-field process discovery. In both cases, the method produced fewer models with respect to the baseline and reduced duplicity by up to 50% without significant impact on complexity.
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1016/j.is.2015.09.003
Information Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
Business process modelling,Business process variant,Business process model consolidation
Artifact-centric business process model,Data mining,Business process,Industrial engineering,Computer science,Process modeling,Business process modeling,Consolidation (soil),Business process discovery,Management science
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
56
C
0306-4379
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
4
0.43
12
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Fredrik Milani1685.29
Marlon Dumas25742371.10
Naved Ahmed3667.00
Raimundas Matulevičius445944.97