Structural Aspects of Business Process Diagram Abstraction

Abstract

As companies more and more often turn todocumenting their business processes in models, the task ofmanaging large model collections becomes essential. Thereis a number of techniques simplifying this task, e.g., constructionof customized process views and business processmodel abstraction. The latter aims at deriving abstract processrepresentations from existing low-level models omitting detailsirrelevant for the current task. A number of papers on processmodel abstraction conceptualized the abstraction problem andproposed algorithms handling simplistic models. To the bestof our knowledge there is no work discussing abstraction ofmodels in BPMN. In this paper we present an abstractionapproach, addressing specific features of BPMN 1.2. Theabstraction approach is order-preserving and is capable ofhandling graph-structured process models.