Business process management has been widely adopted by many organizations,​ resulting in the accumulation of large collections of process models. The majority of these models are rather large and complex. Even though such models constitute a great source of knowledge, they cannot be easily understood by all process stakeholders. Process model abstraction techniques have been proven effective in generating easy to comprehend, high-level views on business process models; thus, such techniques change the way that detailed process models may be utilized within an organization. Although much attention has been given to abstract activities of process models, to the best of our knowledge, there are no research works that deliver abstract process model views, by considering as candidates for abstraction not only activities but also other process model elements. In this paper, we present an abstraction approach that simplifies existing process models by focusing not only on the abstraction of activities, but also on the abstraction of data, roles, messages and artifacts. The proposed approach exploits both model structure and element properties, while it is grounded on a set of abstraction rules. A prototype tool has been implemented as a proof of concept; this tool has been used for validating the proposed approach by automatically applying the suggested abstraction rules to different sets of real-world process models. A number of process stakeholders have also been involved in this validation. Thus, it is empirically proved that the presented work is an effective process model abstraction method that increases the usability of complex business process models, as it enables their rapid comprehension by process stakeholders.

业务流程管理已被许多组织广泛采用，从而积累了大量流程模型。这些模型中的大多数都相当大且复杂。尽管此类模型构成了重要的知识来源，但并非所有流程利益相关者都能轻松理解。流程模型抽象技术已被证明在生成易于理解的业务流程模型的高级视图方面是有效的；因此，这些技术改变了在组织内使用详细过程模型的方式。尽管对流程模型的抽象活动给予了很多关注，但据我们所知，还没有提供抽象流程模型视图的研究工作，通过将活动和其他流程模型元素视为抽象的候选者。在本文中，我们提出了一种抽象方法，该方法不仅关注活动的抽象，还关注数据、角色、消息和工件的抽象，从而简化了现有的流程模型。所提出的方法利用模型结构和元素属性，同时它基于一组抽象规则。原型工具已作为概念验证实施；通过将建议的抽象规则自动应用于不同的现实世界过程模型集，该工具已用于验证建议的方法。许多流程利益相关者也参与了此验证。因此，