Generating reference business process model using heuristic approach based on activity proximity

Abstract

The number of organizations implementing business process innovation by an approach that involves Business Process Management (BPM) system has been increased significantly. Those organizations design, implement and develop BPM system into such a level of maturity and consequently, there are large collections of business process (BP) models in the repository. The existence of numerous process variations leads to both process redundancy and process underutilization, which impact on business performance in negative ways. Thus, there is a need to create a process reference model that can identify and find a representative model without redundancy. This paper introduces a new heuristic-based approach to generate a valid business process reference model from a process repository. Previous research used genetic algorithm (GA) to produce a reference process model. However, GA procedure has a high computational cost on solving such problem. Near the end of this paper, we show the experimental results of the proposed method, which is conveniently executed using business process structure properties and the proximity of activities. It is believed that this process reference model can help a novice process designer to create a new process conveniently. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.