An Approach towards Task Abstraction and Aggregation in Business Processes

The task abstraction and aggregation in a business process can help to (1) obtain customized descriptions of a business process for different users, and (2) derive user interfaces of a business process related to the participating users. This paper proposes an approach for task abstraction and aggregation of a business process based on a role-enriched business process model. For each user role, tasks of a business process are abstracted and aggregated according to the identified control flow patterns. A set of elementary operations for task abstraction and aggregation in business process are specified. The algorithm for deriving the abstracted and aggregated business process is developed. The structural consistency between the business process and the abstracted and aggregated business process has been analyzed. The derived abstracted and aggregated business processes with the proposed approach can be used to support analysing, developing, and updating software components such as user interfaces related to different user roles.