Edges, Structure, and Constraints: The Layout of Business Process Models

How a business process model is laid out will affect the ease of making sense of it. Existing layout features in process modeling tools often rely on generic insights on graph representation, but do not take the specific properties of business process models into account. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that is based on a set of constraints which are specifically identified towards establishing a readable layout of a process model. By exploiting the structure of the process model, the proposed algorithm allows the computation of the final layout in linear time. An empirical evaluation shows that the proposed algorithm indeed provides support beyond what moderately experienced process modelers undertake to lay out their process models.