Creating sound and reversible configurable process models using CoSeNets

All Dutch municipalities offer the same range of services, and the processes delivering these services are quite similar. Therefore, these municipalities can benefit from configurable process models. This requires the merging of existing process variants into configurable models. Unfortunately, existing merging techniques (1) allow for configurable process models which can be instantiated to unsound process models, and (2) are not always reversible, which means that not all original models can be obtained by instantiation of the configurable process model. In this paper, we propose to capture the control-flow of a process by a CoSeNet: a configurable, tree-like representation of the process model, which is sound by construction, and we describe how to merge two CoSeNets into another CoSeNet such that the merge is reversible. Initial experiments show that this approach does not influence complexity significantly, i.e. it results in similar complexities for the configurable process model compared to existing techniques, while it guarantees soundness and reversibility.