On efficient processing of BPMN-Q queries

Business processes are central to the operation of both public and private organizations. With the rapid growth in the number of process models developed by different process designers, it becomes crucial for business process designers to be able to look up the repository for models that could handle a similar situation before developing new ones. Therefore, providing support for querying these business process repositories is a crucial requirement. BPMN-Q is a visual language that has been designed to query repositories of business process models.In this paper, we present a novel approach for efficient evaluation of BPMN-Q queries. The approach is based on indexing process models by the transitive closure of their control flow relation as well as path indexes. The closure index is precomputed while the path index is incrementally built through processing of queries. These indexes are utilized to achieve an effective filtering process and an efficient verification check for BPMN-Q queries. The results of our experimental evaluation show the effectiveness of our proposed approach.