Collaborative discovery and enrichment of business process models using a semantification approach

Business process discovery (BPD) is a crucial step for analyzing an enterprise’s current business. Challenges in business process discovery include the complexity of the enterprise and the interactions among its units and stakeholders; the inaccuracy and incompleteness of available business information and business modelling languages; and the dynamic of businesses in the enterprise. In this paper we present a collaborative solution for BPD grounded in the concepts introduced by DEMO business transaction patterns theory and in a well-known Business Process Management methodology. BPD derives the process happy-flow concerning the most usual situations. Additionally, a happy-flow enrichment allows adding variability to the model, namely the declinations, rejections, and revocations. The solution was developed and deployed in an industrial environment offering a full BPMN model that could be executable targeting a BPMN compatible engine. It helps to create agreements between every participant in process discovery and deliver more complete BPMN models in an efficient and systematic way. This collaborative solution was tested using a real proof of concept in the context of banking. In order to assess the performance of the system a batch of experiments was conducted. Comparing this solution with related work we found no other work containing similar features to ours.