Event Structures as a Foundation for Process Model Differencing, Part 1: Acyclic processes

This paper considers the problem of comparing process models in terms of their behavior. Given two process models, the problem addressed is that of explaining their differences in terms of simple and intuitive statements. This model differencing operation is needed for example in the context of process consolidation, where analysts need to reconcile differences between process variants in order to produce consolidated process models. The paper presents an approach to acyclic process model differencing based on event structures. First the paper considers the use of prime event structures. It is found that the high level of node duplication inherent to prime event structures hinders on the usefulness of the difference diagnostics that can be extracted thereon. Accordingly, the paper defines a method for producing (asymmetric) event structures with reduced duplication.

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