Precise mappings between business process models in versioning scenarios

In the development process of service-oriented systems, business process models are used at different levels. Typically, high-level business process models that describe business requirements and needs are stepwise refined to the IT level by different business modelers and software architects. As a result, different process model versions must be compared and merged by means of model version control. An important prerequisite for process model version control is an elaborated matching approach that results in precise mappings between different process model versions. The challenge of such an approach is to deal with syntactically different process models that are semantically equivalent. For that purpose, matching techniques must consider the semantics of process modeling languages. In this paper, we present a matching approach for process models in a versioning scenario. Based on a term formalization of process models, we enable an efficient and effective way to match syntactically different but semantically equivalent process models resulting in precise mappings. © 2011 IEEE.