Fragment-Based Version Management for Repositories of Business Process Models

  • Chathura C. Ekanayake
  • Marcello La Rosa
  • Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede
  • Marie-Christine Fauvet
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 7044)

Abstract

As organizations reach higher levels of Business Process Management maturity, they tend to accumulate large collections of process models. These repositories may contain thousands of activities and be managed by different stakeholders with varying skills and responsibilities. However, while being of great value, these repositories induce high management costs. Thus, it becomes essential to keep track of the various model versions as they may mutually overlap, supersede one another and evolve over time. We propose an innovative versioning model, and associated storage structure, specifically designed to maximize sharing across process models and process model versions, reduce conflicts in concurrent edits and automatically handle controlled change propagation. The focal point of this technique is to version single process model fragments, rather than entire process models. Indeed empirical evidence shows that real-life process model repositories have numerous duplicate fragments. Experiments on two industrial datasets confirm the usefulness of our technique.

Keywords

Version Control Process Modeling Language Process Model Branch Concurrent Version System Fragment Version 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011

Authors and Affiliations

  • Chathura C. Ekanayake
    • 1
  • Marcello La Rosa
    • 1
  • Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede
    • 1
    • 2
  • Marie-Christine Fauvet
    • 3
  1. 1.Queensland University of TechnologyAustralia
  2. 2.Eindhoven University of TechnologyThe Netherlands
  3. 3.University of GrenobleFrance

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