A Task Taxonomy for the Comparison of BPMN Models

Comparing process models is an important activity in business process management, for example when analyzing process variants, identifying differences between processes, or supporting process harmonization. While various techniques and visualizations have been proposed to support process model comparison, their design and evaluation require an understanding of the tasks users actually perform when comparing models.

In other domains, such as graph analysis and visualization, task taxonomies systematically describe common user tasks and provide a foundation for designing and evaluating new approaches. However, such a taxonomy is currently missing for the comparison of BPMN process models.
In this thesis, you will develop a task taxonomy for BPMN model comparison. You will systematically identify comparison tasks from existing literature and organize them into a structured taxonomy. Depending on the scope of the thesis, the taxonomy may additionally be refined or validated through expert interviews or its application to existing process model comparison approaches. The resulting taxonomy should provide a foundation for future research on the design and evaluation of techniques and visualizations for process model comparison.

What You Will Do

• Review the literature on process model comparison and task taxonomies, including related work from graph analysis and visualization.
• Identify BPMN model comparison tasks. Systematically collect and consolidate tasks that users perform when comparing process models.
• Develop a task taxonomy. Organize the identified tasks into meaningful categories and dimensions and provide clear definitions.
• Evaluate and refine the taxonomy, for example by applying it to existing comparison approaches or through expert feedback.
• Write up the findings, discussing how the taxonomy can support the design and evaluation of future process model comparison approaches.

Your Profile

• Genuine interest in business process management, process modelling, and empirical research
• Interest in systematically analyzing and structuring existing research
• Ability and willingness to conduct a structured literature analysis
• Interest in user-centered evaluation and visualization
• Prior exposure to BPMN, process modelling, or empirical research methods is beneficial

The topic can be scoped for a Bachelor's or a Master's thesis. A Bachelor's thesis may focus on deriving and applying the taxonomy based on existing literature, while a Master's thesis can include a more extensive empirical validation and refinement. The exact research questions and scope will be aligned during the proposal process before registration.

Please get in touch with a short email including your motivation for writing a thesis at our chair (in the body of your email), your CV, a current transcript of records, and the planned start/finish date: rehse@ifi.uzh.ch.