Abstract
Nowadays, it is common for an organization to maintain thousands of business processes. Technologies that provide automatic management for such amount of models are required. The objective of this paper is to deal with the problem of process model fragmentization, clustering and merging for the consolidation of Office Automation (OA) systems in China Mobile Communications Corporation (CMCC). After investigating the structural statistics of real-life process model samples, we propose an approach, based on the refined process structure tree (RPST) and software product line (SPL), to automatically identify reusable process fragments and merge similar ones into master fragments. These fragments can, for example, be used to facilitate the (re)design of numerous process models. Special attention is paid to the empirical study and statistics from the experiment on a sample set of 37 real-life OA processes. Lesson learned and problems to be further considered are also proposed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Office Automation (OA) is one of the most important management information systems (MIS) for large enterprises in China, to process the information of daily office work for all staffs. It fundamentally refers to supporting enterprise general management business processes in offices, e.g., document flow, approval, transfer, and archive.
- 2.
The subsidiary organizations include 31 provincial companies, 1 design institute, and several specialized companies.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
Maybe specific business behavior is divided into different pieces, or a fragment is a composite of some business behavior.
References
van der Aalst, W.M.P.: A decade of business process management conferences: personal reflections on a developing discipline. In: Barros, A., Gal, A., Kindler, E. (eds.) BPM 2012. LNCS, vol. 7481, pp. 1–16. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Awad, A., Sakr, S., Kunze, M., Weske, M.: Design by selection: a reuse-based approach for business process modeling. In: Jeusfeld, M., Delcambre, L., Ling, T.-W. (eds.) ER 2011. LNCS, vol. 6998, pp. 332–345. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Pascalau, E., Awad, A., Sakr, S., Weske, M.: On maintaining consistency of process model variants. In: Muehlen, M., Su, J. (eds.) BPM 2010 Workshops. LNBIP, vol. 66, pp. 289–300. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Emilian, P., Ahmed, A., Sherif, S., Mathias, W.: Partial process models to manage business process variants. Spec. Issue Int. J. Bus. Process Integr. Manage. (IJBPIM) 5(3), 240–256 (2011)
Dijkman, R.M., Dumas, M., van Dongen, B., Uba, R., Mendling, J.: Similarity of business process models: metrics and evaluation. Inf. Syst. 36(2), 498–516 (2011)
Ekanayake, C.C., Dumas, M., GarcÃa-Bañuelos, L., La Rosa, M., ter Hofstede, A.H.M.: Approximate clone detection in repositories of business process models. In: Barros, A., Gal, A., Kindler, E. (eds.) BPM 2012. LNCS, vol. 7481, pp. 302–318. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Kaufman, L., Rousseeuw, P.J.: Finding Groups in Data: An Introduction to Cluster Analysis. Wiley, New York (1990)
Mendling, J.: Metrics for Process Models. LNBIP, vol. 6. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Hepp, M., Leymann, F., Bussler, C., Domingue, J., Wahler, A., Fensel, D.,: Semantic business process management: a vision towards using semantic web services for business process management. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on e Business Engineering, pp. 535–540 (2005)
Rubin, J., Chechik, M.: Combining related products into product lines. In: de Lara, J., Zisman, A. (eds.) FASE 2012. LNCS, vol. 7212, pp. 285–300. Springer, Heidelberg (2012)
Polyvyanyy, A., Vanhatalo, J., Völzer, H.: Simplified computation and generalization of the refined process structure tree. In: Bravetti, M. (ed.) WS-FM 2010. LNCS, vol. 6551, pp. 25–41. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Reichert, M., Dadam, P.: \({\rm {ADEPT}}_{\rm {flex}}\)-supporting dynamic changes of workflows without losing control. J. Intell. Inf. Syst. 10(2), 93–129 (1998)
SAP, IDS, OU, PUE: Project IST 026850 SUPER: Semantics utilized for process management within and between enterprises (2008)
Sakr, S., Awad, A., Kunze, M.: Querying process models repositories by aggregated graph search. In: La Rosa, M., Soffer, P. (eds.) BPM Workshops 2012. LNBIP, vol. 132, pp. 573–585. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)
Gschwind, T., Koehler, J., Wong, J.: Applying patterns during business process modeling. In: Dumas, M., Reichert, M., Shan, M.-C. (eds.) BPM 2008. LNCS, vol. 5240, pp. 4–19. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Vanhatalo, J., Völzer, H., Koehler, J.: The refined process structure tree. In: Dumas, M., Reichert, M., Shan, M.-C. (eds.) BPM 2008. LNCS, vol. 5240, pp. 100–115. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Yan, Z., Dijkman, R.M., Grefen, P.W.P.J.: Fast business process similarity search. Distrib. Parallal Databases 30(2), 105–144 (2012)
Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the Ministry of Education & China Mobile Research Foundation (no.MCM20123011).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
Gao, X. et al. (2014). Process Model Fragmentization, Clustering and Merging: An Empirical Study. In: Lohmann, N., Song, M., Wohed, P. (eds) Business Process Management Workshops. BPM 2013. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 171. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06257-0_32
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06257-0_32
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-06256-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-06257-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)