Generating Hierarchical Reference Process Model Using Fragments Clustering

Process models are becoming more and more widespread in contemporary organizations. For the purpose of reducing cost and improve model quality, the ability to rapidly tailor a reference process to satisfy the changing of business requirements is necessary for organizations. In this context, how to provide a suitable reference process model for a specific domain becomes a challenging question. This paper proposes a method to automatically generate a hierarchical reference process model using fragments clustering from existing process variants. Similar fragments in process variants are detected and clustered firstly. Then an improved reference sub-process is discovered for each cluster of fragments based on a heuristic search. After fragments are replaced by reference sub-processes hierarchically, the refactored process variants are merged into the final reference process model. The quality and usability of the generated reference model are demonstrated by a case study and user experiment from a real industry scenario.