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Proceedings of the Institute for System Programming of the RAS (Proceedings of ISP RAS)

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Comparing process models in the BPMN 2.0 XML format

https://doi.org/10.15514/ISPRAS-2015-27(3)-17

Abstract

Comparing business process models is one of the most significant challenges for business and systems analysts. The complexity of the problem is explained by the fact there is a lack of tools that can be used for comparing business process models. Also there is no universally accepted standard for modeling them. EPC, YAWL, BPEL, XPDL and BPMN are only a small fraction of available notations that have found acceptance among developers. Every process modeling standard has its advantages and disadvantages, but almost all of them comprise an XML schema, which defines process serialization rules. Due to the fact that XML naturally represents hierarchical and reference structure of business process models, these models can be compared using their XML representations. In this paper we propose a generic comparison approach, which is applicable to XML representations of business process models. Using this approach we have developed a tool, which currently supports BPMN 2.0 [1] (one of the most popular business process modeling notations), but can be extended to support other business process modeling standards.

About the Authors

Sergey Ivanov
PAIS laboratory, National Research University Higher School of Economics
Russian Federation


Anna Kalenkova
PAIS laboratory, National Research University Higher School of Economics
Russian Federation


References

1. Stephen A. White. Introduction to BPMN [Online]. Available: http://www.omg.org/bpmn/Documents/Introduction_to_BPMN.pdf

2. W. M. P. van der Aalst, Process Mining: Discovery, Conformance and Enhancement of Business Processes, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 2011.

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9. Object Management Group, "BPMN 2.0," [Online]. Available: http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0/

10. Process Mining Group, Eindhoven Technical University, "ProM 6," [Online]. Available: http://www.promtools.org/


Review

For citations:


Ivanov S., Kalenkova A. Comparing process models in the BPMN 2.0 XML format. Proceedings of the Institute for System Programming of the RAS (Proceedings of ISP RAS). 2015;27(3):255-266. (In Russ.) https://doi.org/10.15514/ISPRAS-2015-27(3)-17



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ISSN 2079-8156 (Print)
ISSN 2220-6426 (Online)