Semantic Design Patterns for Business Processes

Both the academic and industrial communities are increasingly interested in developing methods and tools for automating the design of business process models. In this context, several approaches were proposed to make modeling easier and to enhance the quality of the resulting artifacts. To achieve these objectives, these approaches are based on pattern reuse. Despite the agreed uppon advantages of patterns in accelerating the design process and improving the produced model quality, a few researchers showed how to construct business process patterns. In this paper, we describe an approach to construct Semantic Business Process Patterns (SB2P) from a set of process models. A SB2P is a pattern synthesized from a set of process models belonging to the same business domain. It is composed of process fragments that are semantically close but may have structural and/or behavioral differences.