Modern business process modeling environments support distributed development by means of model version control, i.e., comparison and merging of two different model versions. This is a challenging task since most modeling languages support an almost arbitrary creation of process models. Thus, in multi-developer environments, process models or parts of them are often syntactically very different but semantically equivalent. Hence, the comparison of business process models must be performed on a semantic level rather then on a syntactic level. For the domain of business process modeling, this problem is yet unsolved. This paper describes an approach that allows the semantic comparison of different business process models using a normal form. For that purpose, the process models are fully automatically translated into process model terms and normalized using a term rewriting system. The resulting normal forms can be efficiently compared and easily be used for reconciliation. Our approach enables the semantic comparison of business process models ignoring syntactic redundancies.
['Christian Gerth', 'Markus Luckey', 'Jochen Malte Küster', 'Gregor Engels']
Detection of Semantically Equivalent Fragments for Business Process Model Change Management