Palestra Internacional

Checking Consistency of Process Model Variants using Behavioural Profiles

Prof. Jan Mendling - Universidade de Humboldt - Berlin/Alemanha

Business process models are used at different stages of information system development and organizational design, ranging from high-level documentation of business operations to technical specification of workflow processes. In many organizations there is an increasing problem with process variants. Such variants tend to emerge when business operations evolve differently, e.g. when an organization is decentralized. Before embarking on a process standardization initiative, it is important to investigate the degree of consistency between these different variants. In theory and practice, checking the consistency of such related models is a major challenge. Notions of behavioural equivalence have proven to be too strict for many questions in this context. Therefore, a new concept called behavioural profile is introduced. Behavioural profiles capture the essential behavioural constraints of a process model. These profiles can be computed efficiently, i.e., in cubic time for sound free-choice Petri nets w.r.t. their number of places and transitions. Furthermore, behavioural profiles can be used to define a formal notion of consistency, which is less sensitive to model projections than common criteria of behavioural equivalence.