Process models are becoming more and more widespread in contemporary organizations. For the purpose of reducing cost and improve model quality, the ability to rapidly tailor a reference process to satisfy the changing of business requirements is necessary for organizations. In this context, how to provide a suitable reference process model for a specific domain becomes a challenging question. This paper proposes a method to automatically generate a hierarchical reference process model using fragments clustering from existing process variants. Similar fragments in process variants are detected and clustered firstly. Then an improved reference sub-process is discovered for each cluster of fragments based on a heuristic search. After fragments are replaced by reference sub-processes hierarchically, the refactored process variants are merged into the final reference process model. The quality and usability of the generated reference model are demonstrated by a case study and user experiment from a real industry scenario.
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