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Business process models play an important role in today’s enterprises, hence, model repositories may contain hundreds of models. These models are, for example, reused during process modeling activities or utilized to check the conformance of processes with legal regulations. With respect to the amount of models, such applications benefit from or even require detailed insights into the correspondences between process models or between process models’ nodes. Therefore, various process similarity and matching measures have been proposed during the past few years. This article provides an overview of the state-of-the-art regarding business process model similarity measures and aims at analyzing which similarity measures exist, how they are characterized, and what kind of calculations are typically applied to determine similarity values. Finally, the analysis of 123 similarity measures results in the suggestions to conduct further comparative analyses of similarity measures, to investigate the integration of human input into similarity measurement, and to further analyze the requirements of similarity measurement usage scenarios as future research opportunities.

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Purpose Patterns have proven to be useful for documenting general reusable solutions to a commonly occurring problem. In recent years, several different business process management (BPM)-related patterns have been published. Despite the large number of publications on this subject, there is no work that provides a comprehensive overview and categorization of the published business process model patterns. The purpose of this paper is to close this gap by providing a taxonomy of patterns as well as a classification of 89 research works. Design/methodology/approach The authors analyzed 280 research articles following a structured iterative procedure inspired by the method for taxonomy development from Nickerson et al. (2013). Using deductive and inductive reasoning processes embedded in concurrent as well as joint research activities, the authors created a taxonomy of patterns as well as a classification of 89 research works. Findings In general, the findings extend the current understanding of BPM patterns. The authors identify pattern categories that are highly populated with research works as well as categories that have received far less attention such as risk and security, the ecological perspective and process architecture. Further, the analysis shows that there is not yet an overarching pattern language for business process model patterns. The insights can be used as starting point for developing such a pattern language. Originality/value Up to now, no comprehensive pattern taxonomy and research classification exists. The taxonomy and classification are useful for searching pattern works which is also supported by an accompanying website complementing the work. In regard to future research and publications on patterns, the authors derive recommendations regarding the content and structure of pattern publications.

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