On Similarity of Object-Aware Workflows

Business processes (workflows) are typically the compositions of services (activities and tasks) and play a key role in every enterprise. Finding similar processes in process repositories helps enterprises to reduce their cost and increase their performance. The similarity of different business processes has been measured based on activity labels and structural factors. However, inaccurate and incomplete labels and the existence of multiple labels for similar activities affect the accuracy of the existing methods. Furthermore, with recent advances in business process management and developing innovative paradigms like artifact-centric and decision-aware process modeling, data has become an inseparable part of the process modeling. While data objects and the way they are accessed are recently used to measure the similarity of activities, this approach does not address activities with different granularities. In this paper, we present an approach to measure the similarity of business processes based on the similarity of the life cycles of their objects. The experiments show the effectiveness of the approach to improve the accuracy of the processes similarity task.