Action patterns in business process model repositories

Business process models are extensively used in companies to document and improve business operations. In essence, there are two major challenges. The increasing number of staff with little modeling expertise involved in model design requires new concepts for quality assurance. Moreover, the huge number of process models typically maintained in a model repository impedes extraction of general process knowledge, which can be used for assistance.This article investigates action patterns as a means to address these challenges. Action patterns capture chunks of actions often appearing together in business processes. We formalize the action pattern concept, including several types of behavioral connection, different abstraction levels, and varying action sensitivity to business objects. Our concepts are evaluated based on a prototypical implementation, which we use to extract various types of action patterns from two industrial process model collections. The results demonstrate that action patterns occurring in different application domains can be discovered.