As companies more and more often turn to documenting their business processes in models, the task of managing large model collections becomes essential. There is a number of techniques simplifying this task, e.g., construction of customized process views and business process model abstraction. The latter aims at deriving abstract process representations from existing low-level models omitting details irrelevant for the current task. A number of papers on process model abstraction conceptualized the abstraction problem and proposed algorithms handling simplistic models. To the best of our knowledge there is no work discussing abstraction of models in BPMN. In this paper we present an abstraction approach, addressing specific features of BPMN 1.2. The abstraction approach is order-preserving and is capable of handling graph-structured process models.

1. Structural Aspects of Business Process Diagram Abstraction Sergey Smirnov [email_address] BPMN 2009 20 July 2009

5. Abstraction Operations Elimination Aggregation

6. Abstraction of Activities

7. Stepwise Abstraction 1 2

13. Relations between SESE Fragments p arent - child predecessor-successor if the node set of SESE fragment f 1 is the subset of node set of SESE fragment f 2 , then f 1 is the child of f 2 and f 2 is the parent of f 1 SESE fragment f 1 precedes SESE fragment f 2 (and f 2 succeeds f 1 ) if the outgoing edge of f 1 is the incoming edge of f 2 P 1 c 2 c 1 p 1 s 2 s 1 p 2

15. Variety of BPMN Elements 6 Gateway types 29 Event types 6 activity types 3 types of sequence flow Message flow Associations …

16. Connecting Objects message flow associations sequence flow normal flow exception flow

17. Message Flow message flow ≠ control flow

18. Sequence Flow normal flow = exception flow = control flow

19. Associations associations ≠ control flow

20. Activity Allocation Types compensation activity within ad-hoc subprocess within sequence flow

23. Normalization (I)

24. Normalization (II)

25. Normalization (III)

26. Normalization (IV)

27. Normalization (V)

28. Preliminary Flow Construction BPMN Preliminary Flow

29. Preliminary Model to Auxiliary Model Preliminary flow Auxiliary Notation activities gateways preliminary flow 1 2 3

30. Functions ref in and ref out BPMN Auxiliary Notation ref in : N -> P(A) ref out : N -> P(A) in out A – the set of edges in a BPD

31. BPMN Auxiliary Notation

32. BPD Update: Events usually events are concealed within an identified SESE fragment multiple start/end events signal events

33. BPD Update: Message Flow

34. BPD Update: Data encapsulation of data

35. Example: Initial Model

36. Example: Abstracted Model

37. Alternatives: Ad-hoc Subprocesses

38. Alternatives: Message Flow

39. Challenges: Groups ? ?