Abstract

In the course of business process management, processes can be represented by models in order to document, analyze and improve processes. Many analyses of business process models require the cal-culation of similarity values between activities of different process models. Process models can be cre-ated using domain-specific business process modeling languages. These languages provide predefined domain-specific sets of activities and their properties and allow the annotation of property values based on glossaries. Since this information describes activities in detail, it enables a precise calculation of similarities between process model activities. However, the literature does not provide a suitable simi-larity calculation for two activities in different process models created with the same domain-specific process modeling language. Consequently, relying on design science research the contribution of this paper is to propose such a similarity metric. The metric incorporates annotated property values of ac-tivities and considers the properties’ different relevance, takes into account the characteristics of quan-titative properties and analyzes the contexts of activities. The metric is conceptualized and demonstrated by an example. Future research requires its technical implementation and evaluation.

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