Refactoring business process models with process fragments substitution

Abstract

Since business processes are important assets of enterprises, thousands of business processes are modeled. After modeling business process models, a problem arises here is how to improve the efficiency of these models? In this paper, we propose a novel approach to refactor business process models with process fragments substitution for efficiency improvement. First, we propose a process model smell for identifying inefficient process fragments in business process models based on a sequence relation matrix and a data dependency matrix. Second, we propose a refactoring technique to replace inefficient process fragments in business process models with efficient process fragments. After refactoring, concurrent execution of business tasks in efficient process fragments can be maximized, so the efficiency of business process models can be improved. Experiments show our approach can improve efficiency of business process models effectively.