Title: An automated method for the construction of semantic business process patterns

Authors: Lobna Makni; Nahla Zaaboub Haddar; Hanêne Ben-Abdallah

Addresses: Miracl Laboratory, Faculty of Economics and Management, Sfax University, Sfax, Tunisia ' Miracl Laboratory, Faculty of Economics and Management, Sfax University, Sfax, Tunisia ' Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King Abdullaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; Miracl Laboratory, Sfax, Tunisia

Abstract: The effectiveness of reuse in the development of software prompted researchers to look for reuse techniques for business process modelling. Indeed, a variety of reusable business artefact types has been proposed during the last decade. Among the recently proposed reuse artefact types, semantic business process patterns (SB2Ps) offer process patterns that encapsulate knowledge and commonly used practices in a particular domain. The design using an SB2P provides for the adaptation of these practices and it offers guidance on possible variations. This paper presents an automated method to construct SB2P starting from a set of process models in a given domain. The proposed method has the merit of accounting for the semantic, structural and behavioural information of the initial models. In addition, it produces process patterns where common fragments are distinguished from variation points, which assists business process designers in reusing an SB2P to meet their requirements. The method is illustrated through a case study in the cost accounting domain.

Keywords: business process modelling; semantic business process pattern; SB2P; business object ontology; BOON; semantic rules; mandatory activities; variation points.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPMB.2018.092889

International Journal of Process Management and Benchmarking, 2018 Vol.8 No.3, pp.263 - 290

Received: 03 Feb 2016
Accepted: 22 Aug 2016

Published online: 02 Jul 2018 *

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