A Novel Approach for Business Process Similarity Measure Based on Role Relation Network Mining

Existing business process similarity measure methods mainly focus on the control-flow (e.g., the activity and process model). However, the active factors of business processes, i.e., the roles that execute activities and organizations to which activities belong, have yet received enough attention. Roles are the subject of activities, many changes of process can be summarized as the management of roles and their relationship. In many cases, measuring process similarity from role perspective help find similarities and differences between processes and measure business process similarity more in a comprehensive way. This paper starts from activities and roles, and measures process similarity by constructing two role relation models. One is the Role Relation Network (RRN) that is defined based on the work delivery relation among roles, and the other is the Role Hierarchy Relation Network (RHRN) that is based on the role relation network and the role hierarchy graph. Then, we propose the corresponding business process similarity measure method. The proposed methods extend the applicability of existing process similarity measure methods to a larger application domain. Finally, experiments are designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.