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Refactoring business process models with process fragments substitution

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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.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the Project of National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61702442, 61862065, and 61662085, the Application Basic Research Project in Yunnan Province Grant No. 2018FB105.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Big Data and Intelligent Engineering, Southwest Forestry University, Kunming, China

    Fei Dai, Bi Huang & Youjie Zhao

  2. School of Software, Yunnan University, Kunming, 650091, China

    Qi Mo

  3. School of Big Data, Yunnan Agricultural University, Kunming, 650201, China

    Tong Li

  4. Department of Informatics, The University of Leicester, Leicester, LE1 7RH, UK

    Yongji Yang

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  1. Fei Dai
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  2. Qi Mo
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  3. Tong Li
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Correspondence to Fei Dai.

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Dai, F., Mo, Q., Li, T. et al. Refactoring business process models with process fragments substitution. Wireless Netw (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-020-02367-3

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