Similarity of business process models: Metrics and evaluation

Abstract

a b s t r a c tIt is common for large organizations to maintain repositories of business process models in order to document and to continuously improve their operations. Given such a repository, this paper deals with the problem of retrieving those models in the repository that most closely resemble a given process model or fragment thereof. Up to now, there is a notable research gap on comparing different approaches to this problem and on evaluating them in the same setting. Therefore, this paper presents three similarity metrics that can be used to answer queries on process repositories: (i) node matching similarity that compares the labels and attributes attached to process model elements; (ii) structural similarity that compares element labels as well as the topology of process models; and (iii) behavioral similarity that compares element labels as well as causal relations captured in the process model. These metrics are experimentally evaluated in terms of precision and recall. The results show that all three metrics yield comparable results, with structural similarity slightly outperforming the other two metrics. Also, all three metrics outperform text-based search engines when it comes to searching through a repository for similar business process models.

Business Process Model Similarity as a Proxy for Group Consensus

“…But [24] found that the structural measure performs equally well, i.e. it correctly identifies behaviorally similar and dissimilar processes without looking at behavior.…”

“…Measures for business process model similarity have been investigated thoroughly [21][22][23][24][25][26]. A comprehensive overview can be found in [24].…”

“…A comprehensive overview can be found in [24]. We use the measure suggested in [24] because it covers most prevalent modeling languages as well as all aspects of model similarity that have been introduced so far in the literature: node matching, structural and behavioral similarity. The selected measure works for the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), the language which was used by the organizations where we conducted the study.…”

Improving Business Process Models Using Observed Behavior

“…Similarity of business process models is an active area of research [3,8,9,[12][13][14][15]19]. We distinguish two types of similarity: i) behavioral similarity and ii) structural similarity.…”

A Foundational Approach for Managing Process Variability

“…Notions of inclusion are discussed in work on behavioural equivalence [7,8,9]. Recent works calculate a degree of behavioural similarity between process models based on linguistic, graphmatching, and state-based concepts, see [31] for an overview. Our work instead provides a precise definition of how to determine the behavioural intersection of two process models.…”