Collections Of Business Process Models Research Articles

A word-embedding-based approach for accurate identification of corresponding activities

Smart process repositories have been developed to effectively manage large collections of business process models. Several key features of such repositories require accurate matching of corresponding activities between a pair of process models. However, the existing matching techniques have not yet achieved the desired accuracy, which impedes the effectiveness of process repositories. To that end, this paper proposes a word-embedding-based approach that significantly improves the accuracy of matching. For a comprehensive evaluation of the proposed approach, we have performed experiments using three state-of-the-art word embeddings, two syntactic measures, six semantic measures, and four datasets. The results show that the use of word embeddings outperforms all the syntactic as well as the semantic similarity measures. Moreover, the use of fastText-based embeddings in our proposed technique achieves the highest F1 score, compared to both Word2vec- and GloVe-based embeddings.

Business process graph matching based on vectorial signatures

During the last decade, business processes have gained in popularity leading to a rapid proliferation of business process model collections. The need for efficient and fast systems for similarity search or matching of process models from these collections is becoming an important issue with the increasing of the number of models. Graph-based approaches are very efficient for measuring the similarity of process models. However, they suffer from high complexity that grows exponentially with the size of the graphs. In this paper, we propose an approach for comparing and evaluating the similarity of process models based on vectorial signatures, taking into account the loops which may occur in the process. To reduce the complexity of matching, we split the process graphs into paths, then calculate their similarity based on the similarity of the different vectorial signatures of their paths. Experimental evaluations show the good performance of the proposed approach using several measures.

Mining business rules from business process model repositories

Purpose – Business process has become the core assets of many organizations and it becomes increasing common for most medium to large organizations to have collections of hundreds or even thousands of business process models. The purpose of this paper is to explore an alternative dimension to process mining in which the objective is to extract process constraints (or business rules) as opposed to business process models. It also focusses on an alternative data set – process models as opposed to process instances (i.e. event logs). Design/methodology/approach – The authors present a new method of knowledge discovery to find business activity sequential patterns embedded in process model repositories. The extracted sequential patterns are considered as business rules. Findings – The authors find significant knowledge hidden in business processes model repositories. The hidden knowledge is considered as business rules. The business rules extracted from process models are significant and valid sequential correlations among business activities belonging to a particular organization. Such business rules represent business constraints that have been encoded in business process models. Experimental results have indicated the effectiveness and accuracy of the approach in extracting business rules from repositories of business process models. Social implications – This research will assist organizations to extract business rules from their existing business process models. The discovered business rules are very important for any organization, where rules can be used to help organizations better achieve goals, remove obstacles to market growth, reduce costly mistakes, improve communication, comply with legal requirements, and increase customer loyalty. Originality/value – There has very been little work in mining business process models as opposed to an increasing number of very large collections of business process models. This work has filled this gap with the focus on extracting business rules.

Controlled automated discovery of collections of business process models

Automated process discovery techniques aim at extracting process models from information system logs. Existing techniques in this space are effective when applied to relatively small or regular logs, but generate spaghetti-like and sometimes inaccurate models when confronted to logs with high variability. In previous work, trace clustering has been applied in an attempt to reduce the size and complexity of automatically discovered process models. The idea is to split the log into clusters and to discover one model per cluster. This leads to a collection of process models – each one representing a variant of the business process – as opposed to an all-encompassing model. Still, models produced in this way may exhibit unacceptably high complexity and low fitness. In this setting, this paper presents a two-way divide-and-conquer process discovery technique, wherein the discovered process models are split on the one hand by variants and on the other hand hierarchically using subprocess extraction. Splitting is performed in a controlled manner in order to achieve user-defined complexity or fitness thresholds. Experiments on real-life logs show that the technique produces collections of models substantially smaller than those extracted by applying existing trace clustering techniques, while allowing the user to control the fitness of the resulting models.

Simplifying process model abstraction: Techniques for generating model names

The increased adoption of business process management approaches, tools, and practices has led organizations to accumulate large collections of business process models. These collections can easily include from a hundred to a thousand models, especially in the context of multinational corporations or as a result of organizational mergers and acquisitions. A concrete problem is thus how to maintain these large repositories in such a way that their complexity does not hamper their practical usefulness as a means to describe and communicate business operations. This paper proposes a technique to automatically infer suitable names for business process models and fragments thereof. This technique is useful for model abstraction scenarios, as for instance when user-specific views of a repository are required, or as part of a refactoring initiative aimed to simplify the repository's complexity. The technique is grounded in an adaptation of the theory of meaning to the realm of business process models. We implemented the technique in a prototype tool and conducted an extensive evaluation using three process model collections from practice and a case study involving process modelers with different experience.

Efficient querying of large process model repositories

Recent years have seen an increased uptake of business process management technology in industries. This has resulted in organizations trying to manage large collections of business process models. One of the challenges facing these organizations concerns the retrieval of models from large business process model repositories. For example, in some cases new process models may be derived from existing models, thus finding these models and adapting them may be more effective and less error-prone than developing them from scratch. Since process model repositories may be large, query evaluation may be time consuming. Hence, we investigate the use of indexes to speed up this evaluation process. To make our approach more applicable, we consider the semantic similarity between labels. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate that our approach is efficient.

On the refactoring of activity labels in business process models

Large corporations increasingly utilize business process models for documenting and redesigning their operations. The extent of such modeling initiatives with several hundred models and dozens of often hardly trained modelers calls for automated quality assurance. While formal properties of control flow can easily be checked by existing tools, there is a notable gap for checking the quality of the textual content of models, in particular, its activity labels. In this paper, we address the problem of activity label quality in business process models. We designed a technique for the recognition of labeling styles, and the automatic refactoring of labels with quality issues. More specifically, we developed a parsing algorithm that is able to deal with the shortness of activity labels, which integrates natural language tools like WordNet and the Stanford Parser. Using three business process model collections from practice with differing labeling style distributions, we demonstrate the applicability of our technique. In comparison to a straightforward application of standard natural language tools, our technique provides much more stable results. As an outcome, the technique shifts the boundary of process model quality issues that can be checked automatically from syntactic to semantic aspects.

Business process model repositories – Framework and survey

Context Large organizations often run hundreds or even thousands of different business processes. Managing such large collections of business process models is a challenging task. Software can assist in performing that task, by supporting common management functions such as storage, search and version management of models. It can also provide advanced functions that are specific for managing collections of process models, such as managing the consistency of public and private processes. Software that supports the management of large collections of business process models is called: business process model repository software. Objective This paper contributes to the development of business process model repositories, by analyzing the state of the art. Method To perform the analysis a literature survey and a comparison of existing (business process model) repository technology is performed. Result The results of the state of the art analysis are twofold. First, a framework for business process model repositories is presented, which consists of a management model and a reference architecture. The management model lists the functionality that can be provided and the reference architecture presents the components that provide that functionality. Second, an analysis is presented of the extent to which existing business process model repositories implement the functionality from the framework. Conclusion The results presented in the paper are valuable as a comprehensive overview of business process model repository functionality. In addition they form a basis for a future research agenda. We conclude that existing repositories focus on traditional functionality rather than exploiting the full potential of information management tools, thus we show that there is a strong basis for further research.