Business Process Model Abstraction Based on Fuzzy Clustering Analysis

Abstract

The most prominent Business Process Model Abstraction (BPMA) use case is a construction of a process “quick view” for rapidly comprehending a complex process. Researchers propose various process abstraction methods to aggregate the activities most of which are based on [Formula: see text]-means hard clustering. This paper focuses on the limitation of hard clustering, i.e. it cannot identify the special activities (called “edge activities” in this paper) and each activity must be classified to some subprocess. A new method is proposed to classify activities based on fuzzy clustering which generates a fuzzy matrix by computing the possibilities of activities belonging to subprocesses. According to this matrix, the “edge activities” can be located. Considering the structure correlation feature of the activities in subprocesses, an approach is provided to generate the initial clusters based on the close connection characteristics of subprocesses. A hard partition algorithm is proposed to classify the edge activities and it evaluates the generated abstract models according to a new index designed by control flow order preserving requirement and the evaluation results guide the edge activities to be classified to the optimal hard partition. The proposed method is applied to a process model repository in use. The results verify the validity of the measurement based on the virtual document to generating fuzzy matrix. Also it mines the threshold parameter in the real world process model collection enriched with human designed subprocesses to compute the fuzzy matrix. Furthermore, a comparison is made between the proposed method and the [Formula: see text]-means clustering and the results show our approach more closely approximating the decisions of the involved modelers to cluster activities and it contributes to the development of modeling support for effective process model abstraction.