Promoting Business Process Management Excellence in Russia

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Model browser
Software tool for Reference Model Mining
Model visulization
Explanation wizard for
Reference Model Mining
Reference Model Miner
Graph-based approach Linguistic approach Machine semantic approach
Model maintenance
Loading and registration
of reference models
Storing
of reference models
Figure 31: Architecture of the Reference Model Miner
12.4.2 Application scenario
The application of the presented method is demonstrated below with an example. Since the
development of a reference model remains a complex task, which may be seen as an independent
research result, the following application scenario is primarily intended to be an illustration of the
method.
One of the main problems in reference modelling is the identification of elements that describe
same activities. But if neither a definition of similarity of activities exists nor similar activities can
be identified, it is almost impossible to calculate the similarity of processes. By the comparison
of structural aspects, it allows to get rid of vocabulary problems and to concentrate on structural
analogies between models. A graph-based measure was introduced which is independent of
equality definitions for elements (Walter et al., 2012). Hereby, (subgraph) isomorphisms are used
to determine structural analogy of two EPCs (cf. Figure 32). The advantage of this technique
is that information can be extracted without previous knowledge about the equality of elements.
Obviously, both EPCs are complete structural analog although they describe different processes.
This characteristic can be used for reference modelling.
start
place
order
order
placed
receive
invoice
invoice
received
settle
invoice
invoice
settled
Buyer
receive
products
products
received
finish
order
order
finished
Seller
ship
products
products
shipped
finish
order
order
finished
start
receive
order
order
received
send
invoice
invoice
sent
receive
payment
payment
received
Figure 32: Structural analog process chains
12.5 Conclusion and future work
Reference modelling offers several advantages for the practice of enterprise modelling. However,
these benefits can only be used if well-performing reference models are available. While the
predominant methods are almost exclusively based on deductive approaches, our work presents
an inductive approach. Although this method does not support a pure algorithmic approach, it can