Analysis of Semantic Business Process Models - Techniques Supporting Business Process Improvement and Compliance Checking

The improvement of business processes is a core activity of business process management. In this context, business process models are widely used to document knowledge about the business process and, thus, build the foundation for a process analysis. While there is abundant methodological and tool support to create and maintain process models, the actual analysis – the search for weaknesses and improvement potentials within process models – is mostly performed manually. Based on this observation, this thesis develops an analysis techniques which make use of semantic building block-based languages The core of this approach are patterns constructed using semantic building blocks to represent possible improvement potentials and also compliance rules. These patterns can then be automatically searched in process models to identify candidates for process improvement and compliance violations. Furthermore, evaluation results from the application of this approach and considerations for an implementation are reported.