Discovery and Analysis of Activity Pattern Co-occurrences in Business Process Models

Research on workflow activity patterns recently emerged in order to increase the reuse of recurring business functions (e.g., notification, approval, and decision). One important aspect is to identify pattern cooccurrences and to utilize respective information for creating modeling recommendations regarding the most suited activity patterns to be combined with an already used one. Activity patterns as well as their cooccurrences can be identified through the analysis of process models rather than event logs. Related to this problem, this paper proposes a method for discovering and analyzing activity pattern co-occurrences in business process models. Our results are used for developing a BPM tool which fosters the modeling of business processes based on the reuse of activity patterns. Our tool includes an inference engine which considers the patterns co-occurrences to give design time recommendations for pattern usage.