Business Process Design by View Integration

Abstract

Even though the design of business processes most often has to consolidate the knowledge of several process stakeholders, this fact is utilized only to a limited extent by existing modeling methodologies. We address this shortcoming in this paper by building an analogy between database schema design by view integration on the one hand and process modeling on the other hand. In particular, we specify a method for business process design by view integration starting from two views of a process as input. We identify formal semantic relationships between elements of the two process views which are then used to calculate the integrated process model applying the merge operator. Finally, the integrated model is optimized using reduction rules. A case study with two EPC business process models from the SAP reference model demonstrates the applicability of our approach.