There are several motives for creating process models ranging from technical scenarios in workflow automation to business scenarios in which management decisions are taken. As a consequence, companies typically have different process models for the same process, which differ in terms of granularity. In this context, business process model abstraction serves as a technique that takes a process model as an input and derives a high-level model with coarse-grained activities and the corresponding control flow between them. In this way, business process model abstraction reduces the number of models capturing the same business process on different abstraction levels. In this article, we provide a solution to the problem of deriving the control flow of an abstract process model for the case that an arbitrary grouping of activities is permitted. To this end, we use behavioral profiles and prove that the soundness of the synthesized process model requires a notion of well-structuredness of the abstract model behavioral profile. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the activities can be grouped according to the data flow of the model in a meaningful way, and that this grouping does not directly coincides with a structural decomposition of the process, which is generally assumed by other abstraction approaches. This finding emphasizes the need for handling arbitrary activity groupings in business process model abstraction.
A Semantic Approach for Business Process Model Abstraction