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Understanding and Decomposing Control-Flow Loops in Business Process Models

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Business Process Management (BPM 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13420))

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Abstract

Business process models are usually described in a visual notation and reflect actual processes in systems. As a result, process models often are unstructured and cyclic. Unfortunately, unstructured and cyclic models are difficult to analyze and execute as research shows. Unstructuredness could be overcome using the existing studies, however, the analysis of cyclic models is still an open research problem. For this reason, this paper presents a decomposition of cyclic process models into sets of acyclic models. Together with a simple execution semantics for the acyclic models, the semantics of the decomposed model coincides with the original model if soundness is assumed. The decomposition can be achieved in a quadratic runtime complexity and gives the possibility to apply many existing analysis methodologies for acyclic process models. A short evaluation shows the feasibility of the approach.

The third author’s work was done during his PhD program at Inje University.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/guybrushPrince/mojo.plan.loop, last visited March 2022.

  2. 2.

    https://web.archive.org/web/20131208132841/http://service-technology.org/publications/fahlandfjklvw_2009_bpm, last visited March 2022.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Course Evaluation Service, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Jena, Germany

    Thomas M. Prinz

  2. Department of Industrial and Management Engineering, Inje University, Gimhae, Republic of Korea

    Yongsun Choi

  3. Faculty of Economic Information Systems, University of Economics, Hue University, Hue, Vietnam

    N. Long Ha

Authors
  1. Thomas M. Prinz
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  2. Yongsun Choi
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  3. N. Long Ha
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yongsun Choi .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Claudio Di Ciccio

  2. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Remco Dijkman

  3. Universidad de Sevilla, Seville, Spain

    Adela del Río Ortega

  4. Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany

    Stefanie Rinderle-Ma

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Prinz, T.M., Choi, Y., Ha, N.L. (2022). Understanding and Decomposing Control-Flow Loops in Business Process Models. In: Di Ciccio, C., Dijkman, R., del Río Ortega, A., Rinderle-Ma, S. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13420. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16103-2_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16103-2_21

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-16102-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-16103-2

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