Matthias Kunze

Behavioral similarity: a proper metric

With the increasing influence of Business Process Management, large process model repositories emerged in enterprises and public administrations. Their effective utilization requires meaningful and efficient capabilities to search for models that go beyond text based search or folder navigation, e.g., by similarity. Existing measures for process model similarity are often not applicable for efficient similarity search, as they lack metric features. In this paper, we introduce a proper metric to quantify process similarity based on behavioral profiles. It is grounded in the Jaccard coefficient and leverages behavioral relations between pairs of process model activities. The metric is successfully evaluated towards its approximation of human similarity assessment.

Metric Trees for Efficient Similarity Search in Large Process Model Repositories

Due to the increasing adoption of business process management and the key role of process models, companies are setting up and maintaining large process model repositories. Repositories containing hundreds or thousands of process models are not uncommon, whereas only simplistic search functionality, such as text based search or folder navigation, is provided, today.

Design by selection: a reuse-based approach for business process modeling

During business process design, working procedures in organizations are represented by process models. It is an important task in any process improvement project, yet time consuming and error prone. While many organizations maintain large process model repositories, we observe that the information these repositories carry is not fully exploited during process modeling. In this paper, we present a novel approach to business process design called Design by Selection, which takes advantage of process repositories during design and facilitates reuse of process model components. These components can be static or flexible. Static ones represent the specific aspects of the process model, while flexible components realize re-use: They are defined by visual queries, which return matching process model components to be embedded in the overall process. Thus, process models can be designed in a more efficient, higher quality, and less error-prone way.

Towards Understanding Process Modeling – The Case of the BPM Academic Initiative

Business process models are typically graphs that communicate knowledge about the work performed in organizations. Collections of these models are gathered to analyze and improve the way an organization operates. From a research perspective, these collections tell about modeling styles, the relevance of modeling constructs, and common formal modeling mistakes.

A short survey on process model similarity

Process model similarity has developed into a prolific field of investigation. This paper summarizes the research after the CAISE 2008 paper on this topic. We identify categories of problems and provide an outlook on future directions.

A Platform for Research on Process Model Collections

Business process management has received considerable attention and many companies achieved a high maturity level and hence, generated collections of process models that form a knowledge asset essential to their operations. These collections bear opportunities for innovation: Empirical research establishes methods and techniques to support and improve business process management; yet, these need to be validated with regards to process models from industry. However, due to their heterogeneity, extracting and analyzing process models from process model collections is a tedious task and time consuming.

Querying Process Models Repositories By Aggregated Graph Search

Business process modeling is essential in any process improvement project. Yet, it is a time consuming and an error-prone step. With a rapidly increasing number of process models developed by different process designers, it becomes crucial for business process designers to reuse knowledge existing in model repositories, e.g., to find solutions for a recurring situation. Process model querying provides powerful means to address this situation. However, current approaches fail if no single process model satisfies all constraints of a query.

Querying process models by behavior inclusion

Business processes are vital to managing organizations as they sustain a company’s competitiveness. Consequently, these organizations maintain collections of hundreds or thousands of process models for streamlining working procedures and facilitating process implementation. Yet, the management of large process model collections requires effective searching capabilities. Recent research focused on similarity search of process models, but querying process models is still a largely open topic. This article presents an approach to querying process models that takes a process example as input and discovers all models that allow replaying the behavior of the query. To this end, we provide a notion of behavioral inclusion that is based on trace semantics and abstraction. Additional to deciding a match, a closeness score is provided that describes how well the behavior of the query is represented in the model and can be used for ranking. The article introduces the formal foundations of the approach and shows how they are applied to querying large process model collections. An experimental evaluation has been conducted that confirms the suitability of the solution as well as its applicability and scalability in practice.

An Open Process Model Library

Business process elicitation requires high human and financial resources, often only affordable to large organizations. We observed that many business processes are modeled redundantly consuming a lot of money and resources. Collecting, sharing, and re-using process models overcome this problem. Libraries in the real world are a good example of sharing resources among many members reducing the relative cost of each item.

Local Behavior Similarity

Business process models explicitly capture an organization’s operations and thus are essential to a process oriented organization. Typically, hundreds or thousands of models are stored in business process repositories. Effective capabilities to manage and, in particular, search are required to leverage stored business process models.