Querying Graph-Based Repositories of Business Process Models

Abstract

With the rapid and incremental increase in the number of process models developed by different process designers, it becomes crucial for business process designers to be able to look up the repository for models that could handle a similar situation before developing new ones. In this paper, we present an approach for querying repositories of graph-based business process models. Our approach is based on a visual query language for business processes called BPMN-Q. BPMN-Q is used to query business process models by matching the structure of a graph query to that of a process model. The query engine of our system is built on top of traditional RDBMS. We make use of the robust relational indexing infrastructure in order to achieve an efficient and scalable query evaluation performance.