A process distance metric based on alignment of process structure trees

  • Authors:

  • Xiaodong Fu;Kun Yue;Ping Zou;Feng Wang;Kaifan Ji

  • Affiliations:

  • Yunnan Provincial Key Lab. of Computer Technology Application, Faculty of Information Engineering and Automation, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, China;School of Information Science and Engineering, Yunnan University, Kunming, China;Faculty of Management and Economics, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, China;Yunnan Provincial Key Lab. of Computer Technology Application, Faculty of Information Engineering and Automation, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, China;Yunnan Provincial Key Lab. of Computer Technology Application, Faculty of Information Engineering and Automation, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, China

  • Venue:
  • APWeb'12 Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Web Technologies and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2012

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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.