TY  - JOUR
A1  - Weidlich, Matthias
A1  - Mendling, Jan
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Propagating changes between aligned process models
T2  - The journal of systems and software
N2  - There is a wide variety of drivers for business process modelling initiatives, reaching from organisational redesign to the development of information systems. Consequently, a common business process is often captured in multiple models that overlap in content due to serving different purposes. Business process management aims at flexible adaptation to changing business needs. Hence, changes of business processes occur frequently and have to be incorporated in the respective process models. Once a process model is changed, related process models have to be updated accordingly, despite the fact that those process models may only be loosely coupled. In this article, we introduce an approach that supports change propagation between related process models. Given a change in one process model, we leverage the behavioural abstraction of behavioural profiles for corresponding activities in order to determine a change region in another model. Our approach is able to cope with changes in pairs of models that are not related by hierarchical refinement and show behavioural inconsistencies. We evaluate the applicability of our approach with two real-world process model collections. To this end, we either deduce change operations from different model revisions or rely on synthetic change operations.
KW  - Change propagation
KW  - Model synchronisation
KW  - Behavioural analysis
KW  - Process model alignment
Y1  - 2012
UR  - https://publishup.uni-potsdam.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/35756
SN  - 0164-1212
VL  - 85
IS  - 8
SP  - 1885
EP  - 1898
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - New York
ER  -