Refactoring large process model repositories

Abstract

With the increasing adoption of process-aware information systems, large process model repositories have emerged. Typically, the models in such repositories are re-aligned to real-world events and demands through adaptation on a day-to-day basis. This bears the risk of introducing model redundancies and of unnecessarily increasing model complexity. If no continuous investment is made in keeping process models simple, changes will become more difficult and error-prone over time. Although refactoring techniques are widely used in software engineering to address similar problems, so far, no comparable state-of-the-art has evolved in the business process management domain. Process designers either have to refactor process models by hand or are simply unable to apply respective techniques at all. This paper proposes a catalogue of process model "smells" for identifying refactoring opportunities. In addition, it introduces a set of behavior-preserving techniques for refactoring large process repositories. The proposed refactorings enable process designers to effectively deal with model complexity by making process models better understandable and easier to maintain. The refactorings have been evaluated using large process repositories from the healthcare and automotive domain. To demonstrate the feasibility of the refactoring techniques, a proof-of-concept prototype has been implemented.

Effective application of process improvement patterns to business processes

“…In contrast [44][45][46][47][48][49], exemplify propositions addressing process model quality in terms of structure, comprehensibility etc., i.e., the proper representation of actual business content by model elements.…”

Managing Structural and Textual Quality of Business Process Models

“…The general idea of refactoring was formulated for software and relates to "changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code, yet improves its internal structure" [48]. For process models, often the notion of trace equivalence [49] or one of the notions of bisimulation [50] is considered when refactoring models. In the following, we summarize work on refactoring the structure of a process model and its activity labels.…”

“…In the following, we summarize work on refactoring the structure of a process model and its activity labels. Frameworks for categorizing refactorings have been proposed in [49,19,51].…”

Visualizing Large Business Process Models: Challenges, Techniques, Applications

“…Usually, these processes are captured in process models, which are stored in large process repositories comprising hundreds or even thousands of process models [1]. In turn, each of these process models may comprise a large number of activities and involve a multitude of stakeholders.…”