Methods of structural analysis of business processes

Military University of Technology, Faculty of Cybernetics, Institute of Computer and Information Systems, Warsaw, Poland

^* Corresponding author: jkoszela@wat.edu.pl

Abstract

The article outlines selected methods for analyzing business processes: their definitions and instances. The methods for analytical processing of processes constitute a component of the Business Intelligence environment - process warehouses, including methods for analytical processing and exploration of the collected process definitions and instances - i.e. process mining. One of the main elements of the analysis of processes is to determine the similarity between them. In systems for analyzing large sets of elements, the method of determining similarity should be efficiency because is the basis for others analysis methods, e.g. clustering, classification, etc. A method for analyzing structural similarity of business processes, based on the similarity of sequences of genetic tags of such processes, was presented using the similarity analysis methods based on the editing distance and the developed methods of structural similarity: GNM, DNM, GCM, DCM. The presented similarity methods were used to clustering processes and to determine the central element of the cluster. The developed methods form the basis for the development of similarity methods extended to aspects of semantic similarity of business processes and methods of analysis and exploration of processes.