Representative BPMN 2.0 Process Model Generation from Recurring Structures

The use of process fragments to leverage reuse of process models is well established in the literature. Process fragments are manually or semi-automatically extracted and mainly focus on the textual or behavioural semantics of the process models that they are extracted from. However, in many use cases we also need to use these fragments to derive synthetic process models that satisfy specific structural properties. In order to tackle this challenge we propose a method for automatically generating synthetic, representative, executable process models expressed in Business Process Model and Notation 2.0 (BPMN 2.0) with respect to specific user-defined structural criteria. Our method identifies, selects, and combines recurring sub-structures discovered in a collection of thousands of real world process models. The recurring sub-structures are seen as an extended type of process fragments. For our method we have developed a proof-of-concept prototype and for this we discuss the experimental results obtained from its evaluation.