Measuring Business Process Consistency Across Different Abstraction Levels

Business process modeling can take place at three abstraction levels, namely the conceptual level for system requirements, the logical level for system specification, and the physical level for software development. The consistency between these process models is crucial in process mapping, process integration, and difference detection. Existing work either only provides a simple “yes” or “no” answer as the consistency result, or simply checks the consistency from the control flow perspective. This paper presents a systematic approach to the quantitative measurement of the consistency between business processes across different abstraction levels. We use the essential event constraints to quantify the consistency from the perspectives of control flow and data flow, where the importance of different essential event constraints can also be distinguished. Our approach is implemented in a prototype tool. We evaluate our approach using synthetic datasets, the results of which demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.