Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Process Model Similarity Techniques for Process Querying

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Process Querying Methods

  • 640 Accesses

Abstract

Organizations store hundreds or even thousands of models nowadays in business process model repositories. This makes sophisticated operations, like conformance checking or duplicate detection, hard to conduct without automated support. Therefore, querying methods are used to support such tasks. This chapter reports on an evaluation of six techniques for similarity-based search of process models. Five of these approaches are based on Process Model Matching using various aspects of process models for similarity calculation. The sixth approach, however, is based on a technique from Information Retrieval and considers process models as text documents. All the techniques are compared regarding different measures from Information Retrieval. The results show the best performance for the non-matching-based technique, especially when a matching between models is difficult to determine.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 99.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 129.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Akkiraju, R., Ivan, A.: Discovering business process similarities: An empirical study with SAP best practice business processes. In: Maglio, P.P., Weske, M., Yang, J., Fantinato, M. (eds.) 8th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC), San Francisco, USA. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 6470, pp. 515–526. Springer (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17358-5_35

  2. Antunes, G., Bakhshandeh, M., Borbinha, J., Cardoso, J., Dadashnia, S., Francescomarino, C.D., Dragoni, M., Fettke, P., Gal, A., Ghidini, C., Hake, P., Khiat, A., Klinkmüller, C., Kuss, E., Leopold, H., Loos, P., Meilicke, C., Niesen, T., Pesquita, C., Péus, T., Schoknecht, A., Sheetrit, E., Sonntag, A., Stuckenschmidt, H., Thaler, T., Weber, I., Weidlich, M.: The process model matching contest 2015. In: Kolb, J., Leopold, H., Mendling, J. (eds.) 6th International Workshop on Enterprise Modelling and Information Systems Architectures (EMISA 2015), Innsbruck, Austria. Lecture Notes in Informatics, vol. P-248, pp. 127–155. Gesellschaft für Informatik (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Cayoglu, U., Dijkman, R., Dumas, M., Fettke, P., García-Bañuelos, L., Hake, P., Klinkmüller, C., Leopold, H., Ludwig, A., Loos, P., Mendling, J., Oberweis, A., Schoknecht, A., Sheetrit, E., Thaler, T., Ullrich, M., Weber, I., Weidlich, M.: Report: The process model matching contest 2013. In: Lohmann, N., Song, M., Wohed, P. (eds.) Business Process Management Workshops. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol. 171, pp. 442–463. Springer, Beijing, China (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06257-0_35

  4. de Medeiros, A.K.A., Aalst, W.M.v.d., Weijters, A.J.M.M.: Quantifying process equivalence based on observed behavior. Data Knowl. Eng. 64(1), 55–74 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2007.06.010

  5. Desel, J., Juhás, G.: “What is a Petri net?” informal answers for the informed reader. In: Ehrig, H., Padberg, J., Juhás, G., Rozenberg, G. (eds.) Unifying Petri Nets: Advances in Petri Nets, pp. 1–25. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45541-8_1

    Google Scholar 

  6. Dijkman, R., Dumas, M., García-Bañuelos, L.: Graph matching algorithms for business process model similarity search. In: Dayal, U., Eder, J., Koehler, J., Reijers, H.A. (eds.) 7th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM), Ulm, Germany. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5701, pp. 48–63. Springer (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-03848-8_5

  7. Dijkman, R.M., Dumas, M., Dongen, B.F.v., Käärik, R., Mendling, J.: Similarity of business process models: Metrics and evaluation. Information Systems 36(2), 498–516 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2010.09.006

  8. Dumas, M., García-Bañuelos, L., Dijkman, R.M.: Similarity search of business process models. IEEE Data Eng. Bull. 32(3), 23–28 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Gerke, K., Cardoso, J., Claus, A.: Measuring the compliance of processes with reference models. In: Meersman, R., Dillon, T., Herrero, P. (eds.) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems (OTM), Confederated International Conferences, CoopIS, DOA, IS, and ODBASE, Part I, Vilamoura, Portugal. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5870, pp. 76–93. Springer (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-05148-7_8

  10. Keller, G., Nüttgens, M., Scheer, A.W.: Semantische Prozeßmodellierung auf der Grundlage “Ereignisgesteuerter Prozeßketten (EPK)”. Tech. rep., Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik, Universität Saarbrücken (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Kunze, M., Weidlich, M., Weske, M.: Behavioral similarity - A proper metric. In: 9th International Conference on Business Process Management, Clermont-Ferrand, France, pp. 166–181 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  12. La Rosa, M., Dumas, M., Uba, R., Dijkman, R.M.: Business process model merging: An approach to business process consolidation. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. (TOSEM) 22(2), 11:1–11:42 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1145/2430545.2430547

  13. Landauer, T.K., Foltz, P.W., Laham, D.: An introduction to latent semantic analysis. Discourse Processes 25(2-3), 259–284 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1080/01638539809545028

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Lau, C.K., Fournier, A.J., Xia, Y., Recker, J., Bernhard, E.: Process Model Repository Governance at Suncorp. Tech. rep., Business Process Management Research Group, Queensland University of Technology (2011). http://apromore.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Suncorp-project-report-2.pdf

    Google Scholar 

  15. Levenshtein, V.I.: Binary codes capable of correcting deletions, insertions, and reversals. Sov. Phys. Doklady 10(9), 707–710 (1966)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Manning, C.D., Raghavan, P., Schütze, H.: Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England (2008). https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511809071

  17. Mendling, J.: Detection and Prediction of Errors in EPC Business Process Models. Ph.D. thesis, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Murata, T.: Petri nets properties, analysis and applications. Proc. IEEE 77(4), 541–580 (1989). https://doi.org/10.1109/5.24143

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Object Management Group (OMG): Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) (2011). http://www.omg.org/spec/BPMN/2.0

  20. Polyvyanyy, A., Ouyang, C., Barros, A., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Process querying: Enabling business intelligence through query-based process analytics. Decis. Support Syst. 100, 41–56 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2017.04.011

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Rahm, E., Bernstein, P.A.: A survey of approaches to automatic schema matching. VLDB J. 10(4), 334–350 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1007/s007780100057

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Schoknecht, A., Fischer, N., Oberweis, A.: Process model search using latent semantic analysis. In: Dumas, M., Fantinato, M. (eds.) Business Process Management Workshops: BPM 2016 International Workshops, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilien, Revised Papers. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol. 281, pp. 283–295. Springer (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58457-7_21

  23. Schoknecht, A., Oberweis, A.: LS3: Latent semantic analysis-based similarity search for process models. Enterp. Modell. Inf. Syst. Archit. 12(2), 1–22 (2017). https://doi.org/10.18417/emisa.12.2

    Google Scholar 

  24. Schoknecht, A., Thaler, T., Fettke, P., Oberweis, A., Laue, R.: Similarity of business process models — A state-of-the-art analysis. ACM Comput. Surv. 50(4), 52:1–52:33 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/3092694

  25. Song, L., Wang, J., Wen, L., Wang, W., Tan, S., Kong, H.: Querying process models based on the temporal relations between tasks. In: 15th IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference Workshops (EDOCW), Helsinki, Finland, pp. 213–222. IEEE Computer Society, Helsinki, Finland (2011). https://doi.org/10.1109/EDOCW.2011.12

  26. Thaler, T., Hake, P., Fettke, P., Loos, P.: Evaluating the evaluation of process matching techniques. In: Kundisch, D., Suhl, L., Beckmann, L. (eds.) Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik (MKWI), Paderborn, Germany, pp. 1600–1612. University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Thaler, T., Dadashnia, S., Sonntag, A., Fettke, P., Loos, P.: The IWi Process Model Corpus. Tech. rep., Institute for Information Systems (IWi) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Thaler, T., Schoknecht, A., Fettke, P., Oberweis, A., Laue, R.: A comparative analysis of business process model similarity measures. In: Dumas, M., Fantinato, M. (eds.) Business Process Management Workshops: BPM 2016 International Workshops, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, Revised Papers. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol. 281, pp. 310–322. Springer (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58457-7_23

  29. van Dongen, B.F., Dijkman, R.M., Mendling, J.: Measuring similarity between business process models. In: Bellahsene, Z., Léonard, M. (eds.) 20th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE), Montpellier, Frankreich. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 5074, pp. 450–464. Springer (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69534-9_34

  30. Vogelaar, J., Verbeek, H., Luka, B., van der Aalst, W.M.: Comparing business processes to determine the feasibility of configurable models: A case study. In: Business Process Management Workshops, Clermont-Ferrand, France, pp. 50–61 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Weidlich, M., Dijkman, R., Jan, M.: The ICoP framework: Identification of correspondences between process models. In: 22nd International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE), Hammamet, Tunisia (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Yan, Z., Dijkman, R., Grefen, P.: Fast business process similarity search with feature-based similarity estimation. In: Meersman, R., Dillon, T., Herrero, P. (eds.) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems (OTM), Confederated International Conferences CoopIS, IS, DOA and ODBASE, Part I, Hersonissos, Greece. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 6426, pp. 60–77. Springer (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-16934-2_8

  33. Zezula, P., Amato, G., Dohnal, V., Batko, M.: Similarity search - The metric space approach. Adv. Database Syst., 32 (2006)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute AIFB, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany

    Andreas Schoknecht & Andreas Oberweis

  2. German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) and Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Tom Thaler & Peter Fettke

  3. University of Applied Sciences Zwickau, Zwickau, Germany

    Ralf Laue

Authors
  1. Andreas Schoknecht
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Tom Thaler
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Ralf Laue
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Peter Fettke
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Andreas Oberweis
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Andreas Schoknecht .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    Artem Polyvyanyy

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Schoknecht, A., Thaler, T., Laue, R., Fettke, P., Oberweis, A. (2022). Process Model Similarity Techniques for Process Querying. In: Polyvyanyy, A. (eds) Process Querying Methods. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92875-9_16

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92875-9_16

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-92874-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-92875-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation