An Efficient Recommendation Method for Improving Business Process Modeling

In modern commerce, both frequent changes of custom demands and the specialization of the business process require the capacity of modeling business processes for enterprises effectively and efficiently. Traditional methods for improving business process modeling, such as workflow mining and process retrieval, still requires much manual work. To address this, based on the structure of a business process, a method called workflow recommendation technique is proposed in this paper to provide process designers with support for automatically constructing the new business process that is under consideration. In this paper, with the help of the minimum depth-first search (DFS) codes of business process graphs, we propose an efficient method for calculating the distance between process fragments and select candidate node sets for recommendation purpose. In addition, a recommendation system for improving the modeling efficiency and accuracy was implemented and its implementation details are discussed. At last, based on both synthetic and real-world datasets, we have conducted experiments to compare the proposed method with other methods and the experiment results proved its effectiveness for practical applications.

I. Introduction

To facilitate cooperation and coordination of work across the organization, enterprise systems (ES) [1] have been developed to integrate computer systems that support all phases of an organization's operations. To remain competitive, many organizations have adopted enterprise systems for their mission-critical applications [2], [3]. Further, enterprise systems integrate business processes and align IT to support business strategy. To provide better support for business strategies, workflow technology [4] is essential and is threaded through the very core of the system architecture.