Refactoring Process Models in Large Process Repositories

Abstract. With the increasing adoption of process-aware information systems (PAIS), large process model repositories have emerged. Over time respective models have to be re-aligned to the real-world business processes through customization or adaptation. This bears the risk that model redundancies are introduced and complexity is increased. If no continuous investment is made in keeping models simple, changes are becoming increasingly costly and error-prone. Though refactoring tech-niques are widely used in software engineering to address related prob-lems, this does not yet constitute state-of-the art in business process management. Process designers either have to refactor process models by hand or cannot apply respective techniques at all. This paper pro-poses a set of behaviour-preserving techniques for refactoring large pro-cess repositories. This enables process designers to effectively deal with model complexity by making process models better understandable and easier to maintain.