Change Propagation in Process Models Using Behavioural Profiles

Business process change is at the very core of business process management, which aims at enabling flexible adaptation to changing business needs. However, the wide variety of drivers for business process modeling initiatives, reaching from business evolution to process enactment, results in multiple models that overlap in content due to serving different purposes. That, in turn, imposes serious challenges for the propagation of changes between these process models. Given a change in one model, this paper introduces an approach to determine a change region in another model by exploiting the behavioral profile of corresponding activities. It, therefore, supports the process of change propagation and eases the synchronization of process models significantly. As a major contribution, our approach can handle changes in pairs of models, even if they are not defined in terms of a hierarchical refinement.