Comparison of BPMN2 Diagrams

Models are compared to identify which elements are unchanged and which were added, removed, or modified. This information is necessary for developers to understand which edit steps were applied between two revisions of a model, to discover differences in concurrently developed models and it is also a fundamental building block for advanced processing steps, e.g. model merging. Hence, model comparison is generally considered as a critical factor for the acceptance and success of model-driven development approaches. Surprisingly however, for many model types only inadequate tool support for comparing models is available. This paper presents the prototype of a similarity-based model comparison tool for BPMN2 diagrams. The algorithms and heuristics of the SiDiff model differencing framework have been configured to the specific characteristics of BPMN2 diagrams. An initial evaluation indicates that the presented prototype produces results of high quality.

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