Structural Aspects of Business Process Diagram Abstraction

As companies more and more often turn to documenting their business processes in models, the task of managing large model collections becomes essential. There is a number of techniques simplifying this task, e.g., construction of customized process views and business process model abstraction. The latter aims at deriving abstract process representations from existing low-level models omitting details irrelevant for the current task. A number of papers on process model abstraction conceptualized the abstraction problem and proposed algorithms handling simplistic models. To the best of our knowledge there is no work discussing abstraction of models in BPMN. In this paper we present an abstraction approach, addressing specific features of BPMN 1.2. The abstraction approach is order-preserving and is capable of handling graph-structured process models.