Dennis Wolters and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: Visual Requirements Modeling for Cross-Device Systems. In Computer Science and Information Systems (ComSIS), vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 517-536 (2017)
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@article{WGE2017, author = {Dennis Wolters and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, title = {Visual Requirements Modeling for Cross-Device Systems}, journal = {Computer Science and Information Systems (ComSIS)}, year = {2017}, volume = {14}, number = {2}, pages = {517-536} }

Zille Huma and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: On-the-Fly Computing: Automatic Service Discovery and Composition in Heterogeneous Domains. In Computer Science - Research and Development, vol. 30, no. 3-4, pp. 333--361 (2015)
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@article{Huma14, author = {Zille Huma and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, title = {On-the-Fly Computing: Automatic Service Discovery and Composition in Heterogeneous Domains}, journal = {Computer Science - Research and Development}, year = {2015}, volume = {30}, number = {3-4}, pages = {333--361} }

Gregor Engels and Christian Gerth and Bernd Kleinjohann and Lisa Kleinjohann and Wolfgang Müller and Stefan Sauer: Informationstechnik spart Ressourcen. In Forschungsforum Paderborn, vol. 16/2013, pp. 54--61 (2013)
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@article{EGKKMS2013, author = {Gregor Engels and Christian Gerth and Bernd Kleinjohann and Lisa Kleinjohann and Wolfgang Müller and Stefan Sauer}, title = {Informationstechnik spart Ressourcen}, journal = {Forschungsforum Paderborn}, year = {2013}, volume = {16/2013}, pages = {54--61}, month = {Februar} }

Christian Gerth and Jochen Küster and Markus Luckey and Gregor Engels: Detection and Resolution of Conflicting Change Operations in Version Management of Process Models. In Software and Systems Modeling, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 517-535 (2013)
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@article{GerthSoSym11, author = {Christian Gerth and Jochen Küster and Markus Luckey and Gregor Engels}, title = {Detection and Resolution of Conflicting Change Operations in Version Management of Process Models}, journal = {Software and Systems Modeling}, year = {2013}, volume = {12}, number = {3}, pages = {517-535}, month = {July} }

Version management of process models requires that different versions of process models are integrated by applying change operations. Conflict detection between individually applied change operations and conflict resolution support are integral parts of version management. For conflict detection it is utterly important to compute a precise set of conflicts, since the minimization of the number of detected conflicts also reduces the overhead for merging different process model versions. As not every syntactic conflict leads to a conflict when taking into account model semantics, a computation of conflicts solely on the syntax leads to an unnecessary high number of conflicts. Moreover, even the set of precisely computed conflicts can be extensive and their resolution means a significant workload for a user. As a consequence, adequate support is required that guides a user through the resolution process and suggests possible resolution strategies for individual conflicts. In this paper, we introduce the notion of syntactic and semantic conflicts for change operations of process models. We provide a method how to efficiently compute conflicts precisely, using a term formalization of process models and consider the subsequent resolution of the detected conflicts based on different strategies. Using this approach, we can significantly reduce the number of overall conflicts and reduce the amount of work for the user when resolving conflicts.

Simon Schwichtenberg and Ivan Jovanovikj and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: Poster: CrossEcore: An Extendible Framework to Use Ecore and OCL across Platforms. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering - Companion Volume. (2018)
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@inproceedings{SJG+2018, author = {Simon Schwichtenberg and Ivan Jovanovikj and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, title = {Poster: CrossEcore: An Extendible Framework to Use Ecore and OCL across Platforms}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering - Companion Volume}, year = {2018} }

Simon Schwichtenberg and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: From Open API to Semantic Specifications and Code Adapters. In Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS). IEEE, pp. 484-491 (2017)
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@inproceedings{SGE2017, author = {Simon Schwichtenberg and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, title = {From Open API to Semantic Specifications and Code Adapters}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS)}, year = {2017}, pages = {484-491}, publisher = {IEEE} }

Dennis Wolters and Jonas Kirchhoff and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: Cross-Device Integration of Android Apps. In Quan Z. Sheng and Eleni Stroulia and Samir Tata and Sami Bhiri (eds.): 14th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2016). Springer, LNCS, vol. 9936, pp. 171-185 (2016)
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@inproceedings{WoltersKGE2016, author = {Dennis Wolters and Jonas Kirchhoff and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, editor = {Quan Z. Sheng and Eleni Stroulia and Samir Tata and Sami Bhiri}, title = {Cross-Device Integration of Android Apps}, booktitle = {14th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2016)}, year = {2016}, volume = {9936}, series = {LNCS}, pages = {171-185}, publisher = {Springer} }

Simon Schwichtenberg and Christian Gerth and Zille Huma and Gregor Engels: Normalizing Heterogeneous Service Description Models with Generated QVT Transformations. In Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications (ECMFA'14). Springer, LNCS, vol. 8569, pp. 180-195 (2014)
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@inproceedings{schwichtenberg2014normalizing, author = {Simon Schwichtenberg and Christian Gerth and Zille Huma and Gregor Engels}, title = {Normalizing Heterogeneous Service Description Models with Generated QVT Transformations}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications (ECMFA'14)}, year = {2014}, volume = {8569}, series = {LNCS}, pages = {180-195}, publisher = {Springer} }

Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) enable the reuse and substitution of software services to develop highly flexible software systems. To benefit from the growing plethora of available services, sophisticated service discovery approaches are needed that bring service requests and offers together. Such approaches rely on rich service descriptions, which specify also the behavior of provided/requested services, e.g., by pre- and postconditions of operations. As a base for the specification a data schema is used, which specifies the used data types and their relations. However, data schemas are typically heterogeneous wrt. their structure and terminology, since they are created individually in their diverse application contexts. As a consequence the behavioral models that are typed over the heterogeneous data schemas, cannot be compared directly. In this paper, we present an holistic approach to normalize rich service description models to enable behavior-aware service discovery. The approach consists of a matching algorithm that helps to resolve structural and terminological heterogeneity in data schemas by exploiting domain-specific background ontologies. The resulting data schema mappings are represented in terms of Query View Transformation (QVT) relations that even reflect complex n:m correspondences. By executing the transformation, behavioral models are automatically normalized, which is a prerequisite for a behavior-aware operation matching.

Simon Schwichtenberg and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: RSDL workbench results for OAEI 2014. In Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Ontology Matching co-located with the 13th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC). CEUR-WS.org, {CEUR} Workshop Proceedings, vol. 1317, pp. 155-162 (2014)
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@inproceedings{oaei2014, author = {Simon Schwichtenberg and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, title = {RSDL workbench results for OAEI 2014}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Ontology Matching co-located with the 13th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC)}, year = {2014}, volume = {1317}, series = {{CEUR} Workshop Proceedings}, pages = {155-162}, publisher = {CEUR-WS.org} }

The RSDL workbench was developed as a part of a service composition platform for service markets and provides tools to specify structural and behavioral aspects of services based upon the Rich Service Description Language (RSDL). Such comprehensive service descriptions allow a multi-faceted matching of service requests and offers in terms of their data models, operations, and protocols. Domains and application contexts of such service requests and offers are not known to the matchers in advance. Our data model matcher exploits several background ontologies to find corresponding data model elements. Data model alignments are represented in the form of relational Query View Transformation (QVT) scripts that are used to normalize behavioral models, which is a prerequisite for operation matching. For the OAEI campaign, we excluded background ontologies, because the involved additional costs did not justify the gain yet. In this paper, we present our system and the results for the OAEI campaign.

Masud Fazal-Baqaie and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: Breathing Life into Situational Software Engineering Methods. In In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference of Product Focused Software Development and Process Improvement (PROFES 2014). Springer, vol. 8892, pp. 281-284 (2014)
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@inproceedings{PROFES2014, author = {Masud Fazal-Baqaie and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, title = {Breathing Life into Situational Software Engineering Methods}, booktitle = {In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference of Product Focused Software Development and Process Improvement (PROFES 2014)}, year = {2014}, volume = {8892}, pages = {281-284}, publisher = {Springer} }

Software engineering methods are used to prescribe and coordinate the tasks necessary to plan, build, deliver, and maintain software. There is a broad consensus that there is no one-size-fits-all method and that, e.g., agile and plan-driven approaches have to be mixed sometimes, based on the context of a project. Creating these so-called situational methods and assuring that they cover all necessary details consistently is a challenge. There is also the challenge for the project teams to follow methods as prescribed by the method engineer. Our approach supports the creation of consistent situational methods from a repository of pre-existing building blocks. Moreover, we present means to enact these methods with standard BPEL/BPEL4People workflow engines, automating the coordination of tasks and providing guidance for them.

Dennis Bokermann and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: Use Your Best Device! - Enabling Device Changes at Runtime. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2014), Haifa, Israel. Springer, LNCS, vol. 8659, pp. 357-365 (2014)
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@inproceedings{BGE14, author = {Dennis Bokermann and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, title = {Use Your Best Device! - Enabling Device Changes at Runtime}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2014), Haifa, Israel}, year = {2014}, volume = {8659}, series = {LNCS}, pages = {357-365}, publisher = {Springer} }

Svetlana Arifulina and Marie Christin Platenius and Christian Gerth and Steffen Becker and Gregor Engels and Wilhelm Schäfer: Market-optimized Service Specification and Matching. In Xavier Franch and Aditya K. Ghose and Grace A. Lewis and Sami Bhiri (eds.): 12th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2014). Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 8831, pp. 543-550 (2014)
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@inproceedings{APGBES_ICSOC14, author = {Svetlana Arifulina and Marie Christin Platenius and Christian Gerth and Steffen Becker and Gregor Engels and Wilhelm Schäfer}, editor = {Xavier Franch and Aditya K. Ghose and Grace A. Lewis and Sami Bhiri}, title = {Market-optimized Service Specification and Matching}, booktitle = {12th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2014)}, year = {2014}, volume = {8831}, series = {Lecture Notes in Computer Science}, pages = {543-550}, month = {3.-6. November}, publisher = {Springer} }

Marie Christin Platenius and Markus von Detten and Christian Gerth and Wilhelm Schäfer and Gregor Engels: Service Matching under Consideration of Explicitly Specified Service Variants. In IEEE 20th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2013). IEEE Computer Society Washington, DC, USA, pp. 613--614 (2013) ICWS '13 Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE 20th International Conference on Web Services
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@inproceedings{icws13, author = {Marie Christin Platenius and Markus von Detten and Christian Gerth and Wilhelm Schäfer and Gregor Engels}, title = {Service Matching under Consideration of Explicitly Specified Service Variants}, booktitle = {IEEE 20th International Conference on Web Services (ICWS 2013)}, year = {2013}, pages = {613--614}, publisher = {IEEE Computer Society Washington, DC, USA}, note = {ICWS '13 Proceedings of the 2013 IEEE 20th International Conference on Web Services } }

One of the main ideas of Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is the delivery of flexibly composable services provided on world-wide markets. For a successful service discovery, service requests have to be matched with the available service offers. However, in a situation in which no service that completely matches the request can be discovered, the customer may tolerate slight discrepancies between request and offer. Some existing fuzzy matching approaches are able to detect such service variants, but they do not allow to explicitly specify which parts of a request are not mandatory. In this paper, we improve an existing service matching approach based on Visual Contracts leveraging our preliminary work of design pattern detection. Thereby, we support explicit specifications of service variants and realize gradual matching results that can be ranked in order to discover the service offer that matches a customer's request best.

Zille Huma and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels and Oliver Juwig: Automated Service Composition for On-the-Fly SOAs. In Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC'13). Springer-Verlag (Berlin/Heidelberg), LNCS , vol. 8274, pp. 524--532 (2013)
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@inproceedings{ICSOC13, author = {Zille Huma and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels and Oliver Juwig}, title = {Automated Service Composition for On-the-Fly SOAs}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC'13)}, year = {2013}, volume = {8274}, series = {LNCS }, pages = {524--532}, address = {Berlin/Heidelberg}, publisher = {Springer-Verlag} }

In the service-oriented computing domain, the number of available software services steadily increased in recent years, favored by the rise of cloud computing with its attached delivery models like Software as-a-Service (SaaS). To fully leverage the opportunities provided by these services for developing highly flexible and aligned SOA, integration of new services as well as the substitution of existing services must be simplified. As a consequence, approaches for automated and accurate service discovery and composition are needed. In this paper, we propose an automatic service composition approach as an extension to our earlier work on automatic service discovery. To ensure accurate results, it matches the service request and available offers based on their structural as well as behavioral aspects. Afterwards, possible service compositions are determined by composing the service protocols through a composition strategy based on labeled transition systems.

Benjamin Nagel and Christian Gerth and Jennifer Post and Gregor Engels: Ensuring Consistency Among Business Goals and Business Process Models. In Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International EDOC Conference (EDOC'13). IEEE Computer Society, pp. 17-26 (2013)
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@inproceedings{EDOC13_Nagel, author = {Benjamin Nagel and Christian Gerth and Jennifer Post and Gregor Engels}, title = {Ensuring Consistency Among Business Goals and Business Process Models}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th IEEE International EDOC Conference (EDOC'13)}, year = {2013}, pages = {17-26}, publisher = {IEEE Computer Society} }

The paradigm of service-oriented architectures has emerged as an architectural style for designing enterprise applications. Requirements engineering for such applications comprises the specification of business goal models representing stakeholder objectives and the operationalization to business process models that specify the required composition of services. Inconsistencies between business goals and derived business processes can lead to service compositions that are not in line with the actual stakeholder objectives. For preserving consistency it is required to consider logical and temporal dependencies among goals (e.g. the order in which they need to be achieved) in the derivation of business processes. In previous work, we provided a technique for the elicitation and specification of dependencies between business goals. Extending this approach, we aim at validating the consistency between business goal models and business process models regarding these dependencies. In this paper, we present a pattern-based approach for the automated generation of verifiable business process quality constraints from business goal models. We describe how these constraints can be used to check the consistency between business goals and business processes and demonstrate the applicability of our approach in a case study by using the implemented tool support.

Zille Huma and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels and Oliver Juwig: Towards an Automatic Service Discovery for UML-based Rich Service Descriptions. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 15th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS'12). Springer-Verlag (Berlin/Heidelberg), LNCS, vol. 7590, pp. 709-725 (2012)
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@inproceedings{Models2012, author = {Zille Huma and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels and Oliver Juwig}, title = {Towards an Automatic Service Discovery for UML-based Rich Service Descriptions}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 15th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS'12)}, year = {2012}, volume = {7590}, series = {LNCS}, pages = {709-725}, address = {Berlin/Heidelberg}, publisher = {Springer-Verlag} }

Service-oriented computing (SOC) promises to solve many issues in the area of distributed software development, e.g. the realization of the loose coupling pattern in practice through service discovery and invocation. For this purpose, service descriptions must comprise structural as well as behavioral information of the services otherwise an accurate service discovery is not possible. We addressed this issue in our previous paper and proposed a UML-based rich service description language (RSDL) providing comprehensive notations to specify service requests and offers. However, the automatic matching of service requests and offers specified in a RSDL for the purpose of service discovery is a complex task, due to multifaceted heterogeneity of the service partners. This heterogeneity includes the use of different underlying ontologies or different levels of granularity in the specification itself resulting in complex mappings between service requests and offers. In this paper, we present an automatic matching mechanism for service requests and offers specified in a RSDL that overcomes the underlying heterogeneity of the service partners.

Markus Luckey and Christian Gerth and Christian Soltenborn and Gregor Engels: QUAASY - QUality Assurance of Adaptive SYstems. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC'11). ACM (2011)
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@inproceedings{quaasy_poster11, author = {Markus Luckey and Christian Gerth and Christian Soltenborn and Gregor Engels}, title = {QUAASY - QUality Assurance of Adaptive SYstems}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC'11)}, year = {2011}, month = {June}, publisher = {ACM} }

The emerging approach to tackle the increasing complexity of today's software systems is the use of self-adaptation techniques. Modeling and implementing adaptivity features is a burdensome and error-prone task that potentially results in erroneous system models. As a consequence, quality analysis and assurance must be considered early in the development of self-adaptive systems. We propose a quality assurance approach for self-adaptive systems in terms of an integrated modeling and analysis approach, which helps identifying errors in modeled self-adaptive systems early in the design process. We employ a modeling language for self-adaptive systems including adaptation rules and formally define their semantics. Given the language and its formal semantics, we formulate quality properties, such as fairness of the specified adaptation rule system. These quality properties are verified using a model checking approach.

Markus Luckey and Benjamin Nagel and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: Adapt Cases: Extending Use Cases for Adaptive Systems. In Proceeding of the 6th international symposium on Software engineering for adaptive and self-managing systems. ACM (New York, NY, USA), SEAMS '11, pp. 30--39 (2011)
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@inproceedings{adaptcases_seams11, author = {Markus Luckey and Benjamin Nagel and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, title = {Adapt Cases: Extending Use Cases for Adaptive Systems}, booktitle = {Proceeding of the 6th international symposium on Software engineering for adaptive and self-managing systems}, year = {2011}, series = {SEAMS '11}, pages = {30--39}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, month = {May}, publisher = {ACM} }

Adaptivity is prevalent in today's software. Mobile devices self-adapt to available network connections, washing machines adapt to the amount of laundry, etc. Current approaches for engineering such systems facilitate the specification of adaptivity in the analysis and the technical design. However, the modeling of platform independent models for adaptivity in the logical design phase remains rather neglected causing a gap between the analysis and the technical design phase. To overcome this situation, we propose an approach called Adapt Cases. Adapt Cases allow the explicit modeling of adaptivity with dedicated means, enabling adaptivity to gather attention early in the software engineering process. Since our approach is based on use cases it is easy adoptable in new and even running projects that use the UML as a specification language, and additionally, can be easily incorporated into model-based development environments.

Lial Khaluf and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: Pattern-Based Modeling and Formalizing of Business Process Quality Constraints. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Advanced Information System Engineering (CAiSE'11). Springer (Berlin/Heidelberg), LNCS, vol. 6741, pp. 521-535 (2011)
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@inproceedings{KGE-Caise11, author = {Lial Khaluf and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, title = {Pattern-Based Modeling and Formalizing of Business Process Quality Constraints}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Advanced Information System Engineering (CAiSE'11)}, year = {2011}, volume = {6741}, series = {LNCS}, pages = {521-535}, address = {Berlin/Heidelberg}, publisher = {Springer} }

The quality of business processes can be checked by verifying their compliance with specific quality constraints. These constraints represent a set of required temporal and logical relationships between different steps of business processes. Quality constraints are usually formulated as informal texts, which makes them difficult to be verified, when business processes become complex. One way to solve this problem is by automating the verification of quality constraints on business processes by applying model checking. To apply model checking, both business processes and quality constraints have to be formalized. In this paper, we define a new visual language for modeling quality constraints and we provide a pattern-based translation for quality constraint models into Computation Tree Logic formulas.

Christian Gerth and Markus Luckey and Jochen Küster and Gregor Engels: Precise Mappings between Business Process Models in Versioning Scenarios. In Proceedings of the IEEE 8th International Conference on Services Computing (SCC'11). IEEE Computer Society, pp. 218-225 (2011)
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@inproceedings{GerthSCC11, author = {Christian Gerth and Markus Luckey and Jochen Küster and Gregor Engels}, title = {Precise Mappings between Business Process Models in Versioning Scenarios}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE 8th International Conference on Services Computing (SCC'11)}, year = {2011}, pages = {218-225}, publisher = {IEEE Computer Society} }

In the development process of service-oriented systems, business process models are used at different levels. Typically, high-level business process models that describe business requirements and needs are stepwise refined to the IT level by different business modelers and software architects. As a result, different process model versions must be compared and merged by means of model version control. An important prerequisite for process model version control is an elaborated matching approach that results in precise mappings between different process model versions. The challenge of such an approach is to deal with syntactically different process models that are semantically equivalent. For that purpose, matching techniques must consider the semantics of process modeling languages. In this paper, we present a matching approach for process models in a versioning scenario. Based on a term formalization of process models, we enable an efficient and effective way to match syntactically different but semantically equivalent process models resulting in precise mappings.

Jochen Küster and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: Dynamic Computation of Change Operations in Version Management of Business Process Models. In Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications (ECMFA'10). Springer (Berlin/Heidelberg), LNCS, vol. 6138, pp. 201--216 (2010)
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@inproceedings{KuesterGE10, author = {Jochen Küster and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, title = {Dynamic Computation of Change Operations in Version Management of Business Process Models}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications (ECMFA'10)}, year = {2010}, volume = {6138}, series = {LNCS}, pages = {201--216}, address = {Berlin/Heidelberg}, month = {June}, publisher = {Springer} }

Version management of business process models requires that changes can be resolved by applying change operations. In order to give a user maximal freedom concerning the application order of change operations, position parameters of change operations must be computed dynamically during change resolution. In such an approach, change operations with computed position parameters must be applicable on the model and dependencies and conflicts of change operations must be taken into account because otherwise invalid models can be constructed. In this paper, we study the concept of partially specified change operations where parameters are computed dynamically. We provide a formalization for partially specified change operations using graph transformation and provide a concept for their applicability. Based on this, we study potential dependencies and conflicts of change operations and show how these can be taken into account within change resolution. Using our approach, a user can resolve changes of business process models without being unnecessarily restricted to a certain order.

Christian Gerth and Markus Luckey and Jochen Küster and Gregor Engels: Detection of Semantically Equivalent Fragments for Business Process Model Change Management. In Proceedings of the IEEE 7th International Conference on Services Computing (SCC'10). IEEE Computer Society, pp. 57--64 (2010) Best Student Paper of SCC 2010.
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@inproceedings{GerthSCC10, author = {Christian Gerth and Markus Luckey and Jochen Küster and Gregor Engels}, title = {Detection of Semantically Equivalent Fragments for Business Process Model Change Management}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE 7th International Conference on Services Computing (SCC'10)}, year = {2010}, pages = {57--64}, publisher = {IEEE Computer Society}, note = {Best Student Paper of SCC 2010.} }

Modern business process modeling environments support distributed development by means of model version control, i. e., comparison and merging of two different model versions. This is a challenging task since most modeling languages support an almost arbitrary creation of process models. Thus, in multi-developer environments, process models or parts of them are often syntactically very different but semantically equivalent. Hence, the comparison of business process models must be performed on a semantic level rather then on a syntactic level. For the domain of business process modeling, this problem is yet unsolved. This paper describes an approach that allows the semantic comparison of different business process models using a normal form. For that purpose, the process models are fully automatically translated into process model terms and normalized using a term rewriting system. The resulting normal forms can be efficiently compared and easily be used for reconciliation. Our approach enables the semantic comparison of business process models ignoring syntactic redundancies.

Christian Gerth and Jochen Küster and Markus Luckey and Gregor Engels: Precise Detection of Conflicting Change Operations using Process Model Terms. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 13th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS'10). Springer (Berlin/Heidelberg), LNCS, vol. 6395, no. Part II, pp. 93--107 (2010) ACM Distinguished Paper Award MODELS 2010.
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@inproceedings{GerthModels10, author = {Christian Gerth and Jochen Küster and Markus Luckey and Gregor Engels}, title = {Precise Detection of Conflicting Change Operations using Process Model Terms}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 13th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS'10)}, year = {2010}, volume = {6395}, number = {Part II}, series = {LNCS}, pages = {93--107}, address = {Berlin/Heidelberg}, month = {October}, publisher = {Springer}, note = {ACM Distinguished Paper Award MODELS 2010.} }

Version management of process models requires that changes can be resolved by applying change operations. Conflict detection is an important part of version management and the minimization of the number of detected conflicts also reduces the overhead when resolving changes. As not every syntactic conflict leads to a conflict when taking into account model semantics, a computation of conflicts solely on the syntax leads to an unnecessary high number of conflicts. In this paper, we introduce the notion of syntactic and semantic conflicts for change operations of process models. We provide a method how to efficiently compute conflicts, using a term formalization of process models. Using this approach, we can significantly reduce the number of overall conflicts and thereby reduce the amount of work for the user when resolving conflicts.

Fabian Christ and Jan-Christopher Bals and Gregor Engels and Christian Gerth and Markus Luckey: A Generic Meta-Model-based Approach for Specifying Framework Functionality and Usage. In Proceedings of the 48th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components and Patterns (TOOLS'10), Málaga (Spain). Springer (Berlin/Heidelberg), LNCS, vol. 6141, pp. 21--40 (2010)
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@inproceedings{Christ2010, author = {Fabian Christ and Jan-Christopher Bals and Gregor Engels and Christian Gerth and Markus Luckey}, title = {A Generic Meta-Model-based Approach for Specifying Framework Functionality and Usage}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 48th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components and Patterns (TOOLS'10), Málaga (Spain)}, year = {2010}, volume = {6141}, series = {LNCS}, pages = {21--40}, address = {Berlin/Heidelberg}, month = {June}, publisher = {Springer} }

Enterprise software development is based on the usage of frameworks. However, well-established concepts to specify framework functionality and how to use it can hardly be found. As consequence, there are poor framework documentations. Various problems arise from this, e.g. a high effort for learning a framework and therefore the need of framework specialists. Existing framework description languages (FDL) focus on parts of the problem but do not cover all aspects of specifying framework functionality and usage. In this paper, we present a generic approach for specifying all aspects of framework functionality and usage. We collected requirements to identify relevant aspects and defined a generic meta-model for FDLs. The generic meta-model is the base for defining concrete FDLs while guaranteeing that all relevant framework aspects are covered. Particularly, due to its generic character, parts of the meta-model representing specific framework aspects can be instantiated by existing or newly defined languages.

Christian Gerth and Jochen Küster and Gregor Engels: Language-Independent Change Management of Process Models. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 12th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS'09). Denver (CO, USA). Springer (Berlin/Heidelberg), LNCS, vol. 5795 , pp. 152--166 (2009)
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@inproceedings{GerthModels09, author = {Christian Gerth and Jochen Küster and Gregor Engels}, title = {Language-Independent Change Management of Process Models}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 12th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS'09). Denver (CO, USA)}, year = {2009}, volume = {5795 }, series = {LNCS}, pages = {152--166}, address = {Berlin/Heidelberg}, publisher = {Springer} }

In model-driven development approaches, process models are used at different levels of abstraction and are described by different languages. Similar to other software artifacts, process models are developed in team environments and underlie constant change. This requires reusable techniques for the detection of changes between different process models and the computation of dependencies and conflicts between changes. In this paper, we propose a framework for the construction of process model change management solutions that provides generic techniques for the detection of differences and the computation of dependencies and conflicts between changes. The framework contains an abstract representation for process models that serves as a common denominator for different process models. In addition, we show how the framework is instantiated exemplarily for BPMN.

Jochen Küster and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: Dependent and Conflicting Change Operations of Process Models. In Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Model-Driven Architecture Foundations and Applications (ECMDA-FA'09). Springer (Berlin/Heidelberg), LNCS, vol. 5562, pp. 158--173 (2009)
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@inproceedings{ECMDA-09, author = {Jochen Küster and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, title = {Dependent and Conflicting Change Operations of Process Models}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Model-Driven Architecture Foundations and Applications (ECMDA-FA'09)}, year = {2009}, volume = {5562}, series = {LNCS}, pages = {158--173}, address = {Berlin/Heidelberg}, publisher = {Springer} }

Version management of models is common for structural diagrams such as class diagrams but still challenging for behavioral models such as process models. For process models, conflicts of change operations are difficult to resolve because often dependencies to other change operations exist. As a consequence, conflicts and dependencies between change operations must be computed and shown to the user who can then take them into account while creating a consolidated version. In this paper, we introduce the concepts of dependencies and conflicts of change operations for process models and provide a method how to compute them. We then discuss different possibilities for resolving conflicts. Using our approach it is possible to enable version management of process models with minimal manual intervention of the user.

Jochen Küster and Christian Gerth and Alexander Förster and Gregor Engels: Detecting and Resolving Process Model Differences in the Absence of a Change Log. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM'08). Springer (Berlin/Heidelberg), LNCS, vol. 5240, pp. 244--260 (2008)
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@inproceedings{DetKGFE08, author = {Jochen Küster and Christian Gerth and Alexander Förster and Gregor Engels}, title = {Detecting and Resolving Process Model Differences in the Absence of a Change Log}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM'08)}, year = {2008}, volume = {5240}, series = {LNCS}, pages = {244--260}, address = {Berlin/Heidelberg}, publisher = {Springer} }

Business-driven development favors the construction of process models at different abstraction levels and by different people. As a consequence, there is a demand for consolidating different versions of process models by detecting and resolving differences. Existing approaches rely on the existence of a change log which logs the changes when changing a process model. However, in several scenarios such a change log does not exist and differences must be identified by comparing process models before and after changes have been made. In this paper, we present our approach to detecting and resolving differences between process models, in the absence of a change log. It is based on computing differences and deriving change operations for resolving differences, thereby providing a foundation for variant and version management in these cases.

Dennis Wolters and Jonas Kirchhoff and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: XDAI-A: Framework for Enabling Cross-Device Integration of Android Apps. In Khalil Drira and Hongbing Wang and Qi Yu and Yan Wang and François Charoy and Jan Mendling and Mohamed Mohamed and Zhongjie Wang and Sami Bhiri (eds.): Service-Oriented Computing - ICSOC 2016 Workshops and Satellite Events. Springer, LNCS, vol. 10380, pp. 203--206 (2016)
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@inproceedings{WKG+2016, author = {Dennis Wolters and Jonas Kirchhoff and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, editor = {Khalil Drira and Hongbing Wang and Qi Yu and Yan Wang and François Charoy and Jan Mendling and Mohamed Mohamed and Zhongjie Wang and Sami Bhiri}, title = {XDAI-A: Framework for Enabling Cross-Device Integration of Android Apps}, booktitle = {Service-Oriented Computing - ICSOC 2016 Workshops and Satellite Events}, year = {2016}, volume = {10380}, series = {LNCS}, pages = {203--206}, publisher = {Springer} }

Dennis Wolters and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: Modeling Cross-Device Systems with Use Case Diagrams. In Proceedings of the CAiSE'18 Forum at the 28th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'16). CEUR-WS.org, CEUR Workshop Proceedings (2016)
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@inproceedings{WGE2016, author = {Dennis Wolters and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, title = {Modeling Cross-Device Systems with Use Case Diagrams}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the CAiSE'18 Forum at the 28th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'16)}, year = {2016}, series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings}, publisher = {CEUR-WS.org} }

Enes Yigitbas and Christian Gerth and Stefan Sauer: Konzeption modellbasierter Benutzungsschnittstellen für verteilte Selbstbedienungssysteme. In Tagungsband des Workshop Modellbasierte Entwicklung von Benutzungsschnittstellen (MoBe'13) im Rahmen der INFORMATIK 2013. Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI), Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) , pp. 2714-2723 (2013)
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@inproceedings{mobe13, author = {Enes Yigitbas and Christian Gerth and Stefan Sauer}, title = {Konzeption modellbasierter Benutzungsschnittstellen für verteilte Selbstbedienungssysteme}, booktitle = {Tagungsband des Workshop Modellbasierte Entwicklung von Benutzungsschnittstellen (MoBe'13) im Rahmen der INFORMATIK 2013}, year = {2013}, series = {Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) }, pages = {2714-2723}, publisher = {Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI)} }

Benjamin Nagel and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: Goal-driven Composition of Business Process Models. In Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Engineering Service-Oriented Applications (WESOA 2013) (accepted for application). (2013)
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@inproceedings{WESOA13_Nagel, author = {Benjamin Nagel and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, title = {Goal-driven Composition of Business Process Models}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Engineering Service-Oriented Applications (WESOA 2013) (accepted for application)}, year = {2013} }

Timo Kehrer and Christian Gerth: CVSM 2013 Challenge: Recognizing High-level Edit Operations in Evolving Models.. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Comparison and Versioning of Software Models (CVSM'13). FG Softwaretechnik, Gesellschaft für Informatik e.v. (GI), Softwaretechnik-Trends, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 32-34 (2013)
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@inproceedings{CVSM13, author = {Timo Kehrer and Christian Gerth}, title = {CVSM 2013 Challenge: Recognizing High-level Edit Operations in Evolving Models.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Comparison and Versioning of Software Models (CVSM'13)}, year = {2013}, volume = {33}, number = {2}, series = {Softwaretechnik-Trends}, pages = {32-34}, month = {May}, publisher = {FG Softwaretechnik, Gesellschaft für Informatik e.v. (GI)} }

Benjamin Nagel and Christian Gerth and Jennifer Post and Gregor Engels: Kaos4SOA - Extending KAOS Models with Temporal and Logical Dependencies. In Proceedings of the CAiSE'13 Forum at the 25th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'13). CEUR-WS.org, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 998, pp. 9-16 (2013)
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@inproceedings{CAiSE13_Nagel, author = {Benjamin Nagel and Christian Gerth and Jennifer Post and Gregor Engels}, title = {Kaos4SOA - Extending KAOS Models with Temporal and Logical Dependencies}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the CAiSE'13 Forum at the 25th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'13)}, year = {2013}, volume = {998}, series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings}, pages = {9-16}, publisher = {CEUR-WS.org} }

Christian Gerth and Markus Luckey: Towards Rich Change Management for Business Process Models. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Comparison and Versioning of Software Models (CVSM'12). FG Softwaretechnik, Gesellschaft für Informatik e.v. (GI), Softwaretechnik-Trends, vol. 32, no. 4, pp. 32-34 (2012)
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@inproceedings{rich_change_mgmt_gerth_luckey_2012, author = {Christian Gerth and Markus Luckey}, title = {Towards Rich Change Management for Business Process Models}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Workshop on Comparison and Versioning of Software Models (CVSM'12)}, year = {2012}, volume = {32}, number = {4}, series = {Softwaretechnik-Trends}, pages = {32-34}, month = {November}, publisher = {FG Softwaretechnik, Gesellschaft für Informatik e.v. (GI)} }

Business process models play an important role in the development of large IT systems, since they are easy to understand by all project stakeholders. High-level process models may be created by domain experts, which are stepwise refined in later development phases until they become executable. To establish such model-driven development (MDD) approaches in praxis, a comprehensive tool support of the complete model life cycle is necessary including model change management in particular. In this position paper, we give an overview of our framework for change management of business process models. This framework allows to merge process models in different modeling languages and considers the execution semantics of process models during comparison. Based on these results, we derive further research challenges with the aim to obtain a rich change management solution for business process models.

Benjamin Nagel and Christian Gerth and Enes Yigitbas and Fabian Christ and Gregor Engels: Model-driven Specification of Adaptive Cloud-based Systems. In Proceedings of 1st International Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering for High Performance and Cloud Computing (MDHPCL) at MODELS'12. (2012)
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@inproceedings{nagel_mdhpcl12, author = {Benjamin Nagel and Christian Gerth and Enes Yigitbas and Fabian Christ and Gregor Engels}, title = {Model-driven Specification of Adaptive Cloud-based Systems}, booktitle = {Proceedings of 1st International Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering for High Performance and Cloud Computing (MDHPCL) at MODELS'12}, year = {2012} }

Markus Luckey and Christian Thanos and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: Multi-Staged Quality Assurance for Self-Adaptive Systems. In Proceedings of 1st International Workshop on EVALUATION for SELF-ADAPTIVE and SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS at SASO'12. (2012)
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@inproceedings{luckey_eval4saso12, author = {Markus Luckey and Christian Thanos and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, title = {Multi-Staged Quality Assurance for Self-Adaptive Systems}, booktitle = {Proceedings of 1st International Workshop on EVALUATION for SELF-ADAPTIVE and SELF-ORGANIZING SYSTEMS at SASO'12}, year = {2012} }

Zille Huma and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels and Oliver Juwig: A UML-based Rich Service Description Language for Automatic Service Discovery of Heterogeneous Service Partners. In Proceedings of the Forum at the CAiSE'12 Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. CEUR-WS.org, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 855, pp. 90--97 (2012)
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@inproceedings{CAiSE12_Huma_Gerth, author = {Zille Huma and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels and Oliver Juwig}, title = {A UML-based Rich Service Description Language for Automatic Service Discovery of Heterogeneous Service Partners}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Forum at the CAiSE'12 Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering}, year = {2012}, volume = {855}, series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings}, pages = {90--97}, publisher = {CEUR-WS.org} }

Service-oriented computing (SOC) emerges as a promising trend solving many issues in distributed software development. Following the essence of SOC, service descriptions are dened by the service partners in their independent heterogeneous domains based on current standards, such as, WSDL. However, these standards are mostly syntactic and do not provide any semantic description which may lead to inaccurate service discovery results. Currently many research efforts aim at formulating rich service descriptions for service partners comprising syntactic as well as semantic information. However, due to the underlying heterogeneity of service partners in terms of different underlying ontologies, different description notations, etc., matching of rich service descriptions for accurate service discovery is a complex task. In this paper, we come up with a proposal for rich service descriptions based on the UML.

Christian Gerth: A Framework for Change Management of Business Process Models. In Proceedings of the Joint Workshop of the German Research Training Groups in Computer Science. , pp. 183-184 (2010)
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@inproceedings{GerthWS10, author = {Christian Gerth}, title = {A Framework for Change Management of Business Process Models}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Joint Workshop of the German Research Training Groups in Computer Science}, year = {2010}, pages = {183-184}, month = {May}, organization = {DFG} }

Jochen Küster and Christian Gerth and Alexander Förster and Gregor Engels: A Tool for Process Merging in Business-Driven Development. In Proceedings of the Forum at the CAiSE'08 Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering. CEUR-WS.org, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 344, pp. 89--92 (2008)
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@inproceedings{Kuester08, author = {Jochen Küster and Christian Gerth and Alexander Förster and Gregor Engels}, title = {A Tool for Process Merging in Business-Driven Development}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Forum at the CAiSE'08 Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering}, year = {2008}, volume = {344}, series = {CEUR Workshop Proceedings}, pages = {89--92}, publisher = {CEUR-WS.org} }

Business-driven development favors the construction of process models at different abstraction levels and by different people. As a consequence, there is a demand for consolidating different versions of process models by merging them. In this paper, we study a basic scenario, derive requirements and present a prototype for detecting and resolving changes between process models.

Svetlana Arifulina and Marie Christin Platenius and Christian Gerth and Steffen Becker and Gregor Engels and Wilhelm Schäfer: Configuration of Specification Language and Matching for Services in On-The-Fly Computing. no. tr-ri-14-342. Heinz Nixdorf Institute, University of Paderborn (2014)
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@techreport{APGBES_TP14, author = {Svetlana Arifulina and Marie Christin Platenius and Christian Gerth and Steffen Becker and Gregor Engels and Wilhelm Schäfer}, title = {Configuration of Specification Language and Matching for Services in On-The-Fly Computing}, institution = {Heinz Nixdorf Institute, University of Paderborn}, year = {2014}, number = {tr-ri-14-342}, month = {July} }

Zille Huma and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels: Automated Service Discovery and Composition for On-the-Fly SOAs. no. tr-ri-13-333. University of Paderborn, Germany (2013)
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@techreport{tr-ri-13-333, author = {Zille Huma and Christian Gerth and Gregor Engels}, title = {Automated Service Discovery and Composition for On-the-Fly SOAs}, institution = {University of Paderborn, Germany}, year = {2013}, number = {tr-ri-13-333} }

Jochen Küster and Dániel Kovács and Eduard Bauer and Christian Gerth: Integrating Coverage Analysis into Test-driven Development of Model Transformations. IBM Research Report, no. RZ 3846. IBM Research - Zurich (2013)
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@techreport{techreportIBM13, author = {Jochen Küster and Dániel Kovács and Eduard Bauer and Christian Gerth}, title = {Integrating Coverage Analysis into Test-driven Development of Model Transformations}, institution = {IBM Research - Zurich}, year = {2013}, type = {IBM Research Report}, number = {RZ 3846}, month = {April} }

For testing model transformations, a software engineer usually designs a test suite consisting of test cases where each test case consists of one or several models. In order to ensure a high quality of such a test suite, coverage achieved by the test cases with regard to the system under test must be systematically measured. The results obtained during coverage analysis can then be used e.g. for creating additional test cases. In addition to measuring coverage, a soft- ware engineer developing a model transformation is also confronted with how to integrate such coverage analysis results into the development process. For example, the software engineer has to decide when to measure coverage, when to investigate the results and how and when to take appropriate actions. In this paper, we present a prototypical tool which can be used for measuring coverage of test requirements for model transformations. We explain how a software engineer can make use of it in a test-driven development process for model transformations, in order to systematically develop high-quality model transformations.

Christian Gerth and Markus Luckey and Jochen Küster and Gregor Engels: Detection of Semantically Equivalent Fragments for Business Process Model Change Management. IBM Research Report, no. 3767. IBM Research - Zurich (2010)
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@techreport{GerthTR10, author = {Christian Gerth and Markus Luckey and Jochen Küster and Gregor Engels}, title = {Detection of Semantically Equivalent Fragments for Business Process Model Change Management}, institution = {IBM Research - Zurich}, year = {2010}, type = {IBM Research Report}, number = {3767}, month = {February} }

Modern business process modeling environments support distributed development by means of model version control, i.e., comparison and merging of two different model versions. This is a challenging task since most modeling languages support an almost arbitrary creation of process models. Thus, in multi-developer environments, process models or parts of them are often syntactically very different but semantically equivalent. Hence, the comparison of business process models must be performed on a semantic level rather then on a syntactic level. For the domain of business process modeling, this problem is yet unsolved. This paper describes an approach that allows the semantic comparison of different business process models using a normal form. For that purpose, the process models are fully automatically translated into process model terms and normalized using a term rewriting system. The resulting normal forms can be efficiently compared. Our approach enables the semantic comparison of business process models ignoring syntactic redundancies.

Christian Gerth: Business Process Models - Change Management. Type: Phd Thesis (2013)
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@phdthesis{dissGerth, author = {Christian Gerth}, title = {Business Process Models - Change Management}, year = {2013} }

Driven by the need for a closer alignment of business and IT requirements, the role of business process models in the development of enterprise software systems has increased continuously. Similar to other software artifacts, process models are developed and refined in team environments by several stakeholders, resulting in different versions. These versions need to be merged in order to obtain an integrated process model. Existing solutions to this basic problem in the field of software configuration management are mainly limited to textual documents, e.g., source code. This monograph presents a generally applicable framework for process model change management, which provides easy-to-use comparison and merging capabilities for the integration of different process model versions. The framework supports popular modeling languages such as BPMN, BPEL, or UML Activity Diagrams. Differences between process models are represented in terms of intuitive, high-level change operations. Equipped with a sophisticated analysis of dependencies and a semantic-aware computation of conflicts between differences, the framework constitutes a comprehensive and practically usable solution for process model change management in the model-driven development of enterprise software systems.

Christian Gerth: Business Process Merging - An Approach based on Single-Entry-Single-Exit Regions. Type: Diploma Thesis, diplomathesis (2007)
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@mastersthesis{Gerth2007a, author = {Christian Gerth}, title = {Business Process Merging - An Approach based on Single-Entry-Single-Exit Regions}, year = {2007}, type = {diplomathesis}, month = {October} }

In this thesis an approach for business process merging is presented that covers the detection of differences between given versions of a process model and provides operations for the resolution of the differences with respect to existing dependencies.

Alexej Bondarenko and Daniel Dau and Stefan Feldkord and Markus Gellermann and Christian Gerth and Markus Hornkamp and Björn Mühlenfeld and Haibo Qiu: Patternbasierte Geschäftsprozess-Modellierung (PaGeMo). pg_papersUniversity of Paderborn (2006)
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@techreport{gerth2006, author = {Alexej Bondarenko and Daniel Dau and Stefan Feldkord and Markus Gellermann and Christian Gerth and Markus Hornkamp and Björn Mühlenfeld and Haibo Qiu}, title = {Patternbasierte Geschäftsprozess-Modellierung (PaGeMo)}, institution = {University of Paderborn}, year = {2006}, type = {pg_papers} }

Effektive und zuverlässige Geschäftsprozesse stellen einen wichtigen Baustein für den Erfolg moderner Unternehmen dar. Für das Erstellen, das Verstehen und die Optimierung solcher Geschäftsprozesse ist es wichtig, Anforderungen an diese Prozesse, sogenannte Process Constraints, überprüfen zu können. Bei diesen Anforderungen handelt es sich zum Beispiel um gesetzliche, domänenspezifische oder qualitative Anforderungen. Die Erfüllung und Sicherstellung von Qualitätsanforderungen, wie sie zum Beispiel in der ISO 9001-Norm formuliert sind, durch die Geschäftsprozesse eines Unternehmens ist ein wichtiger Bestandteil des Qualitätsmanagements des Unternehmens. Solche Qualitätsanforderungen lassen sich als Muster (engl. Pattern) für die Erstellung neuer, beziehungsweise die Optimierung bestehender Geschäftsprozesse verstehen. Die ISO 9001-Norm gibt hierbei keine konkrete Form der Geschäftsprozesse vor, sondern fordert lediglich die Einhaltung einiger Randbedingungen und Rahmenvorgaben durch die Prozesse. Eine automatische Verifikation der Qualitätsanforderungen an einen Geschäftsprozess scheitert zunächst daran, dass diese Anforderungen in der ISO 9001-Norm lediglich in natürlicher Sprache formuliert sind. Zuerst musste daher eine Möglichkeit gefunden werden, Qualitätsanforderungen beziehungsweise Pattern zu präzisieren und zu formalisieren, um die automatische Verifikation zu ermöglichen. Zusätzlich sollten diese Pattern jedoch auch von menschlichen Nutzern wie Qualitätsmanagern, Domänenexperten und Prozessdesignern leicht zu erstellen, zu lesen und anzuwenden sein. Um diese beiden Forderungen zu erfüllen, wurden UML 2.0 Aktivitätsdiagramme um einige neue Stereotypen erweitert. Diese Erweiterungen der Aktivitätsdiagramme ermöglichen sowohl eine visuelle Modellierung der Pattern, besitzen jedoch auch eine klare formale Struktur. Im Rahmen der Projektgruppe wurde ein automatisiertes Tool entwickelt werden, das die Modellierung und Integration dieser Pattern in bestehende Geschäftsprozesse sowie die anschließende Verifikation der Geschäftsprozesse unterstützt. Dieses Tool ermöglicht es einem Entwickler, zu jedem Zeitpunkt festzustellen, ob ein Geschäftsprozess die als Pattern formulierten (Qualitäts-) Anforderungen erfüllt.