Generating Preliminary Edit Lenses from Automatic Pattern Discovery in Business Process Modeling

Business process models are often used to describe a single system at different levels of abstraction—for instance, a business workflow specification and its corresponding IT implementation—and have to be synchronized. Describing such model synchronizations with approaches to bidirectional model transformations (e.g., lenses) has several advantages from maintainability to verification. However, describing a synchronization from scratch by manually writing update operations can be tedious and error-prone. We show how to automatically gener- ate such synchronizations by identifying refinement patterns in the rela- tion between different models and by representing those patterns as edit lenses. Although these generated synchronization operations may not completely reflect all the refinement patterns that correlate the models in practice, a considerable part of manual work can be saved by generating them automatically first, and then only check and optimize them manually.