An approach for business process model registration based on ISO/IEC 19763-5

Abstract

To facilitate business collaboration and interoperation among enterprises, it is critical to discover and reuse appropriate business processes modeled in different languages and stored in different repositories. However, the formats of business process models are very different, which makes it a challenge to fuse them in a unified way without changing their original representations and semantics. To solve this problem, this paper uses semantic interoperability technique which is able to transform heterogeneous process models into uniform registered items. Based on the general and unambiguous metamodel for process model registration (PMR for short) in ISO/IEC 19763-5 that we proposed before, in this article, we provide a generic process model registration framework for registering heterogeneous business process models to facilitate semantic discovery of business processes across enterprises, and promote process interoperation and business collaboration. Considering that Event-driven Process Chain (EPC) is a popular process model widely used in the industry, we focus on the mapping rules and related specific transformation algorithms from EPC to PMR as an instantiation of our framework and develop an automatic process model registration tool for EPC. Moreover, we conduct a series of experiments to verify the correctness and efficiency of our proposed framework by leveraging the real data set of 604 EPCs from SAP.