Approximate clone detection in repositories of business process models

  • Authors:
  • Chathura C. Ekanayake;Marlon Dumas;Luciano García-Bañuelos;Marcello La Rosa;Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede

  • Affiliations:
  • Queensland University of Technology, Australia;University of Tartu, Estonia;University of Tartu, Estonia;Queensland University of Technology, Australia;Queensland University of Technology, Australia,Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • BPM'12 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Business Process Management
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Evidence exists that repositories of business process models used in industrial practice contain significant amounts of duplication. This duplication may stem from the fact that the repository describes variants of the same processes and/or because of copy/pasting activity throughout the lifetime of the repository. Previous work has put forward techniques for identifying duplicate fragments (clones) that can be refactored into shared subprocesses. However, these techniques are limited to finding exact clones. This paper analyzes the problem of approximate clone detection and puts forward two techniques for detecting clusters of approximate clones. Experiments show that the proposed techniques are able to accurately retrieve clusters of approximate clones that originate from copy/pasting followed by independent modifications to the copied fragments.