CAiSE’13

Short-bio

Marlon Dumas is Professor of Software Engineering at University of Tartu and Research Director at STACC: a research center gathering ten Estonian IT companies and two universities with the aim of conducting industry-driven research in software engineering and data mining. Marlon's current research focuses on business process modeling and analysis, as well as mining of business process execution logs. He is co-author of the textbook "Fundamentals of Business Process Management" (Springer 2013).

Abstract

Oftentimes business processes exist not as singular entities that can be managed in isolation, but as families of variants that need to be managed
together. When it comes to modelling these variants, analysts are faced with the dilemma of whether to model each variant separately or to model multiple or all variants as a single model. The former option leads to a proliferation of models that share common parts, leading to redundancy and possible inconsistency. The latter approach leads to less but more complex models, thus hindering on their comprehensibility. This paper presents a decomposition driven method to capture a family of process variants in a consolidated manner taking into account the above trade-off. We applied our method on a case study in the banking sector. A reduction of 50% of duplication was achieved in this case study.