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Meronymy-Based Aggregation of Activities in Business Process Models

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Conceptual Modeling – ER 2010 (ER 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 6412))

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Abstract

As business process management is increasingly applied in practice, more companies document their operations in the form of process models. Since users require descriptions of one process on various levels of detail, there are often multiple models created for the same process. Business process model abstraction emerged as a technique reducing the number of models to be stored: given a detailed process model, business process model abstraction delivers abstract representations for the same process. A key problem in many abstraction scenarios is the transition from detailed activities in the initial model to coarse-grained activities in the abstract model. This transition is realized by an aggregation operation clustering multiple activities to a single one. So far, humans decide on how to aggregate, which is expensive. This paper presents a semi-automated approach to activity aggregation that reduces the human effort significantly. The approach takes advantage of an activity meronymy relation, i.e., part-of relation defined between activities. The approach is semi-automated, as it proposes sets of meaningful aggregations, while the user still decides. The approach is evaluated by a real-world use case.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany

    Sergey Smirnov & Mathias Weske

  2. Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

    Remco Dijkman

  3. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany

    Jan Mendling

Authors
  1. Sergey Smirnov
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  2. Remco Dijkman
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  3. Jan Mendling
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  4. Mathias Weske
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NF, Canada

    Jeffrey Parsons

  2. Dept. of Computer Science, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Ookayama 2-12-1, Meguro-ku, 152-8552, Tokyo, Japan

    Motoshi Saeki

  3. Department of Information Systems Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, 84105, Beer-Sheva, Israel

    Peretz Shoval

  4. Department of Management Information Systems, University of British Columbia, Sauder School of Business, 153-2053 Main Mall, V6T 1Z2, Vancouver, BC, Canada

    Carson Woo  & Yair Wand  & 

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Smirnov, S., Dijkman, R., Mendling, J., Weske, M. (2010). Meronymy-Based Aggregation of Activities in Business Process Models. In: Parsons, J., Saeki, M., Shoval, P., Woo, C., Wand, Y. (eds) Conceptual Modeling – ER 2010. ER 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6412. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16373-9_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16373-9_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-16372-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-16373-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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