Automatic Synthesis of Reference Processes Applying Semantic Concepts

Optimizing business processes is a necessary prerequisite to reduce transactional costs in and between enterprises. Therefore companies spend huge efforts for adapting predefined processes, modeling their value-added business processes and implementing them with IT systems. Several tools are available for modeling the processes and the generation of code, nevertheless changing a sub-process often requires to be propagated to the whole process. Thus, methods are necessary to support automated actualization of process models omitting this time-consuming manual task. To reach this goal, the synthesis of predefined processes has to be automated. Therefore process models need to be extended with information describing the semantics of the processes. To automate this task Semantic Web Standards can be applied to obtain machineunderstandable information. Extending each process description with semantic information enables an automatic synthesis of value-added processes. This paper shows a first approach how to annotate process models with semantic data, describes synthesis algorithms and evaluates a prototypical implementation.