Abstract
This paper presents a technique to diagnose differences between business process models in the EPC notation. The diagnosis returns the exact position of a difference in the business process models and diagnoses the type of a difference, using a typology of differences developed in previous work. This in contrast to existing techniques for detecting process differences (by showing non-equivalence), which return simple true/false statements, or statements in terms of a formal semantics. Neither type of statement is helpful to a business analyst not versed in formal semantics. A case study illustrates the usefulness of the technique. It also shows that, although the technique has exponential complexity, it can be used in practice, because of repeated scoping of the models. The technique can be used, for example, to resolve differences between operational process in a merger between organizations.
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Dijkman, R. (2008). Diagnosing Differences between Business Process Models. In: Dumas, M., Reichert, M., Shan, MC. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5240. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85758-7_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85758-7_20
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