A Process Distance Metric Based on Alignment of Process Structure Trees

  • Xiaodong Fu
  • Kun Yue
  • Ping Zou
  • Feng Wang
  • Kaifan Ji
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 7234)

Abstract

For various applications in today’s service-oriented enterprise computing systems, such as process-oriented service discovering or clustering, it is necessary to measure the distance between two process models. In this paper, we propose a quantitative measure to calculate the distance or similarity between different block-structured processes. We first transform each process into a process structure tree, and then calculate the process distance based on the alignment of two process structure trees. The proposed distance metric satisfies four distance measure properties, i.e., non-negativity, identity of indiscernible, symmetry and triangle inequality. These properties make the distance metric can be used as a quantitative tool in effective process model management activities. We illustrate the methodology with examples, by which its features are shown. Moreover, experiment study shows that the proposed method is feasible.

Keywords

Business process Process distance Process structure tree Tree alignment 
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012

Authors and Affiliations

  • Xiaodong Fu
    • 1
  • Kun Yue
    • 2
  • Ping Zou
    • 3
  • Feng Wang
    • 1
  • Kaifan Ji
    • 1
  1. 1.Yunnan Provincial Key Lab. of Computer Technology Application, Faculty of Information Engineering and AutomationKunming University of Science and TechnologyKunmingChina
  2. 2.School of Information Science and EngineeringYunnan UniversityKunmingChina
  3. 3.Faculty of Management and EconomicsKunming University of Science and TechnologyKunmingChina

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