Improved model management with aggregated business process models

Contemporary organizations invest much efforts in creating models of their business processes. This raises the issue of how to deal with large sets of process models that become available over time. This paper proposes an extension of Event-driven Process Chains, called the aggregate EPC (aEPC), which can be used to describe a set of similar processes with a single model. By doing so, the number of process models that must be managed can be decreased. But at the same time, the process logic for each specific element of the set over which aggregation takes place can still be distinguished. The presented approach is supported as an add-on to the ARIS modeling tool box. To show the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach, we discuss its practical application in the context of a large financial organization.