Automatic Extraction of Process Categories from Process Model Collections

Many organizations build up their business process management activities in an incremental way. As a result, there is no overarching structure defined at the beginning. However, as business process modeling initiatives often yield hundreds to thousands of process models, there is a growing need for such a structure. This challenge calls for a technique to extract process categories from a set of process models automatically which yields an up-to-date view of the structure of a collection of process models. It also provides a means to check whether pre-defined process categories are still reasonable. In this paper, we introduce a technique for automatically extracting process categories from process model collections and test it using a collection from industry. The results demonstrate the usefulness of the technique by revealing issues of the pre-existing process categories. In this way, we contribute to the field of process model management and quality assurance

Automatic extraction of process categories from process model collections

Many organizations build up their business process management activities in an incremental way. As a result, there is no overarching structure defined at the beginning. However, as business process modeling initiatives often yield hundreds to thousands of process models, there is a growing need for such a structure. This challenge calls for a technique to extract process categories from a set of process models automatically which yields an up-to-date view of the structure of a collection of process models. It also provides a means to check whether pre-defined process categories are still reasonable. In this paper, we introduce a technique for automatically extracting process categories from process model collections and test it using a collection from industry. The results demonstrate the usefulness of the technique by revealing issues of the pre-existing process categories. In this way, we contribute to the field of process model management and quality assurance

Ähnlichkeitsbasierte Suche in Geschäftsprozessmodelldatenbanken

Die Wiederverwendung von Prozessmodellen bietet sich zur Reduzierung des hohen Modellierungsaufwands an. Allerdings ist das Auffinden von ähnlichen Modellen in großen Modellsammlungen manuell nicht effizient möglich. Hilfreich sind daher Suchmöglichkeiten nach relevanten Modellen, die als Vorlage zur Modellierung genutzt werden können. In dieser Arbeit werden Ansätze beschrieben, um innerhalb von Prozessmodellbibliotheken nach ähnlichen Modellen und Aktivitäten zu suchen