Publication
Towards a Minimal Cost of Change Approach for Inductive Reference Model Development
Peyman Ardalani; Constantin Houy; Peter Fettke; Peter Loos
In: Proceedings of the 21st European Conference on Information Systems. European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS-13), 21st, June 5-8, Utrecht, Netherlands, AIS, 2013.
Abstract
Business Process Management (BPM) has advanced to be one of the most intensely discussed topics in Information Systems (IS) research. Based on the growing maturity of its concepts, methods and techniques BPM has, furthermore, gained tremendous importance in organizational practice. More and more organizations develop and use individual business process models as a fundament for their operations. As the development of individual business process models is a complex and expensive endeavour, organisations aim at reusing and adapting already existing business process models, so called reference models. However, so far only a limited amount of reference models for selected domains exist, which makes the development of new and reliable reference models a highly relevant issue. In this contribution, we present a new heuristic approach for the inductive development of reference process models based on existing individual process models. Our approach focuses on minimal cost of change (MCC) (based on minimal graph edit distance) when adapting the developed reference model to match the underlying individual process models. Furthermore, an according software prototype supporting automated inductive reference model development is presented as a proof of concept. Finally, our approach is compared to other state of the art approaches in this field in order to qualitatively evaluate its feasibility and usefulness.