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Refactor Business Process Models with Redundancy Elimination

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Advances in Parallel & Distributed Processing, and Applications

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Abstract

Since business processes are important assets, enterprises must be able to deal with their quality issues. Since understandability is one important quality criterion, a question arises here is how to improve the understandability of these models? In this paper, we propose a novel approach to refactor business process models represented as Petri nets with redundancy elimination for improving their understandability. More specifically, we first propose a process model smell for identifying redundant elements in a business process model using the unfolding technique, where the metric of this smell is an implicit place (IP). To avoid the state explosion problem caused by concurrency, we present a novel algorithm for computing an IP from the complete finite prefix unfolding (CFPU) rather than the reachability graph (RG) of a net system. Then, we propose three refactoring operations to eliminate an IP from the business process model without changing their external behavior. After refactoring, the size of the model is decreased such that the model is easier to be understood, that is, the understandability of the model can be improved. Experiments show our approach can eliminate IPs from business process models efficiently and preserve the behavior of these models.

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Acknowledgments

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.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

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

    Fei Dai, Huihui Xue, Zhenping Qiang & Zhihong Liang

  2. School of Information Science and Engineering, Qufu Normal University, Jinning, China

    Lianyong Qi

  3. Department of Computer Engineering, Persian Gulf University, Bushehr, Iran

    Mohammad R. Khosravi

  4. Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Shiraz University of Technology, Shiraz, Iran

    Mohammad R. Khosravi

Authors
  1. Fei Dai
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  2. Huihui Xue
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  3. Zhenping Qiang
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  4. Lianyong Qi
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  5. Mohammad R. Khosravi
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  6. Zhihong Liang
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    Hamid R. Arabnia

  2. School of Computing and Data Sciences, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston, MA, USA

    Leonidas Deligiannidis

  3. Center for Cyberspace Research (CCR), Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson AFB, OH, USA

    Michael R. Grimaila

  4. Electrical and Computer Engineering, Air Force Institute of Technology, Wright-Patterson AFB, OH, USA

    Douglas D. Hodson

  5. Information and Computer Sciences, Nara Women’s University, Nara, Japan

    Kazuki Joe

  6. School of Computing, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Meguro City, Japan

    Masakazu Sekijima

  7. Facultad de Informática - CIC PBA, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, La Plata, Argentina

    Fernando G. Tinetti

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Dai, F., Xue, H., Qiang, Z., Qi, L., Khosravi, M.R., Liang, Z. (2021). Refactor Business Process Models with Redundancy Elimination. In: Arabnia, H.R., et al. Advances in Parallel & Distributed Processing, and Applications. Transactions on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69984-0_37

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69984-0_37

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-69983-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-69984-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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