Similarity of Business Process Models—A State-of-the-Art Analysis

Abstract

Business process models play an important role in today’s enterprises, hence, model repositories may contain hundreds of models. These models are, for example, reused during process modeling activities or utilized to check the conformance of processes with legal regulations. With respect to the amount of models, such applications benefit from or even require detailed insights into the correspondences between process models or between process models’ nodes. Therefore, various process similarity and matching measures have been proposed during the past few years. This article provides an overview of the state-of-the-art regarding business process model similarity measures and aims at analyzing which similarity measures exist, how they are characterized, and what kind of calculations are typically applied to determine similarity values. Finally, the analysis of 123 similarity measures results in the suggestions to conduct further comparative analyses of similarity measures, to investigate the integration of human input into similarity measurement, and to further analyze the requirements of similarity measurement usage scenarios as future research opportunities.

A Similarity-Based Hierarchical Clustering Method for Manufacturing Process Models

“…They considered business process models as graphs and defined the structural feature between graphs, namely the graph-edit distance, as the criterion of similarity. Many different similarity concepts have been proposed from other studies, and a few comprehensive studies suggested that similarity measures between business process models can support the search and reuse of similar process models [5][6][7]. Despite a rich set of previous studies contributing to the process similarity research, there is still a lack of proper methods for manufacturing processes since the BPM approach has not been actively discussed in manufacturing industry.…”

A Comparative Analysis of Business Model Notations

“…They concluded that no modeling technique is better than another. Schoknecht et al (2017) analyzed the similarity of business process models. They defined business models as the sequences consist of activities, events, and connectors.…”

Cross-domain similarity assessment for workflow improvement to handle Big Data challenge in workflow management

“…However, there is not a united and multi-disciplinary approach to deal with the complexity of workflows. Most research works prefers to have contributions focusing either on scientific workflows or business workflows (for example, see [6] and [7]). Hence, as a new contribution, this paper addresses a solution that has a workflow context alignment from the relatedness aspect of workflows.…”

“…In recent years, many business processes and scientific workflow matching algorithms and similarity measures have been developed [6,7]. For example, Starlinger et al [6] proposed domain agnostic similarity measurement methods.…”