Graph theory and model collection management: conceptual framework and runtime analysis of selected graph algorithms

Abstract

Analysing conceptual models is a frequent task of business process management (BPM), for instance to support comparison or integration of business processes, to check business processes for compliance or weaknesses, or to tailor conceptual models for different audiences. As recently, many companies have started to maintain large model collections and analysing such collections manually may be laborious, practitioners have articulated a demand for automatic model analysis support. Hence, BPM scholars have proposed a plethora of different model analysis techniques. As virtually any conceptual model can be interpreted as a mathematical graph and model analysis techniques often include some kind of graph problem, in this paper, we introduce a graph algorithm based model analysis framework that can be accessed by specialized model analysis techniques. To prove that basic graph algorithms are feasible to support such a framework, we conduct a performance analysis of selected graph algorithms.