Summary
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.
On the other hand, advanced methods have recently been proposed in the literature to ascertain the similarity of process models. However, due to performance reasons, an exhaustive similarity search by pairwise comparison is not feasible in large process model repositories.
This paper presents an indexing approach based on metric trees, a hierarchical search structure that saves comparison operations during search with nothing but a distance function at hand. A detailed investigation of this approach is provided along with a quantitative evaluation thereof, showing its suitability and scalability in large process model repositories.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
van der Aalst, W.M.P., de Medeiros, A.K.A., Weijters, A.J.M.M.T.: Process equivalence: Comparing two process models based on observed behavior. In: Dustdar, S., Fiadeiro, J.L., Sheth, A.P. (eds.) BPM 2006. LNCS, vol. 4102, pp. 129–144. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Awad, A.: Bpmn-q: A language to query business processes. In: EMISA, pp. 115–128 (2007)
Brin, S.: Near neighbor search in large metric spaces. In: VLDB 1995: Proceedings of the 21th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, pp. 574–584. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco (1995)
Chávez, E., Navarro, G., Baeza-Yates, R., MarroquÃn, J.L.: Searching in Metric Spaces. ACM Comput. Surv. 33(3), 273–321 (2001)
Chiueh, T.-C.: Content-based image indexing. In: VLDB 1994: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, pp. 582–593. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco (1994)
Ciaccia, P., Patella, M., Zezula, P.: M-tree: An efficient access method for similarity search in metric spaces. In: VLDB 1997: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, pp. 426–435. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco (1997)
Dijkman, R.: Diagnosing differences between business process models. In: Dumas, M., Reichert, M., Shan, M.-C. (eds.) BPM 2008. LNCS, vol. 5240, pp. 261–277. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Dijkman, R.M., Dumas, M., GarcÃa-Bañuelos, L.: Graph matching algorithms for business process model similarity search. In: Dayal, U., Eder, J., Koehler, J., Reijers, H.A. (eds.) BPM 2009. LNCS, vol. 5701, pp. 48–63. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Gao, X., Xiao, B., Tao, D., Li, X.: A Survey of Graph Edit Distance. Pattern Analysis & Applications 13(1), 113–129 (2010)
Guttman, A.: R-trees: a dynamic index structure for spatial searching. SIGMOD Rec. 14(2), 47–57 (1984)
Hidders, J., Dumas, M., van der Aalst, W.M.P., ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Verelst, J.: When are two workflows the same? In: CATS 2005: Proceedings of the 2005 Australasian Symposium on Theory of Computing, pp. 3–11. Australian Computer Society, Inc., Darlinghurst (2005)
Hjaltason, G.R., Samet, H.: Index-driven similarity search in metric spaces (survey article). ACM Trans. Database Syst. 28(4), 517–580 (2003)
Koschmider, A.: Ähnlichkeitsbasierte Modellierungsunterstützung für Geschäftsprozesse. PhD thesis, Universität Karlsruhe (TH), Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften (2007)
Küster, J.M., Gerth, C., Förster, A., Engels, G.: Detecting and resolving process model differences in the absence of a change log. In: Dumas, M., Reichert, M., Shan, M.-C. (eds.) BPM 2008. LNCS, vol. 5240, pp. 244–260. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Levenshtein, V.I.: Binary Codes Capable of Correcting Deletions, Insertions and Reversals. Soviet Physics Doklady 10, 707 (1966)
Li, C., Reichert, M., Wombacher, A.: On measuring process model similarity based on high-level change operations. In: Li, Q., Spaccapietra, S., Yu, E., Olivé, A. (eds.) ER 2008. LNCS, vol. 5231, pp. 248–264. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Mendling, J., van Dongen, B.F., van der Aalst, W.M.P.: On the Degree of Behavioral Similarity between Business Process Models. In: Nüttgens, M., Rump, F.J., Gadatsch, A. (eds.) EPK. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 303, pp. 39–58. CEUR-WS.org (2007)
Minor, M., Tartakovski, A., Bergmann, R.: Representation and structure-based similarity assessment for agile workflows. In: Weber, R.O., Richter, M.M. (eds.) ICCBR 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4626, pp. 224–238. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Rosa, M.L., Reijers, H.A., van der Aalst, W.M.P., Dijkman, R.M., Mendling, J., Dumas, M., Garcia-Banuelos, L.: Apromore: An advanced process model repository (2009), http://eprints.qut.edu.au/27448/
Uhlmann, J.K.: Metric Trees. Applied Mathematics Letters 4, 61–62 (1991)
Uhlmann, J.K.: Satisfying general proximity/similarity queries with metric trees. Information Processing Letters 40(4), 175–179 (1991)
van der Aalst, W.M.P., Basten, T.: Inheritance of Workflows: An Approach to Tackling Problems Related to Change. Theor. Comput. Sci. 270(1-2), 125–203 (2002)
van der Aalst, W.M.P.: Inheritance of business processes: A journey visiting four notorious problems. In: Ehrig, H., Reisig, W., Rozenberg, G., Weber, H. (eds.) Petri Net Technology for Communication-Based Systems. LNCS, vol. 2472, pp. 383–408. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
van Dongen, B., Dijkman, R., Mendling, J.: Measuring Similarity between Business Process Models. In: Bellahsène, Z., Léonard, M. (eds.) CAISE 2008. LNCS, vol. 5074, pp. 450–464. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
van Glabbeek, R.J., Weijland, W.P.: Branching Time and Abstraction in Bisimulation Semantics. J. ACM 43(3), 555–600 (1996)
Weber, B., Reichert, M.: Refactoring process models in large process repositories. In: Bellahsène, Z., Léonard, M. (eds.) CAiSE 2008. LNCS, vol. 5074, pp. 124–139. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Weidlich, M., Weske, M.: Structural and Behavioural Commonalities of Process Variants. In: Gierds, C., Sürmeli, J. (eds.) Proceedings of the 2nd Central-European Workshop on Services and their Composition, ZEUS 2010, Berlin, Germany, February 25-26. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, vol. 563, pp. 41–48. CEUR-WS.org (2010)
Weske, M.: Business Process Management – Concepts, Languages, Architectures. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus (2007)
Yan, Z., Dijkman, R., Grefen, P.: Business process model repositories - framework and survey (2009), http://cms.ieis.tue.nl/Beta/Files/WorkingPapers/Beta_wp292.pdf
Yianilos, P.N.: Data structures and algorithms for nearest neighbor search in general metric spaces. In: SODA 1993: Proceedings of the Fourth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, pp. 311–321. Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia (1993)
Zezula, P., Amato, G., Dohnal, V., Batko, M.: Similarity Search: The Metric Space Approach. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus (2005)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kunze, M., Weske, M. (2011). Metric Trees for Efficient Similarity Search in Large Process Model Repositories. In: zur Muehlen, M., Su, J. (eds) Business Process Management Workshops. BPM 2010. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 66. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20511-8_49
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20511-8_49
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20510-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20511-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)