A Graph-based Method for Merging Business Process Models by Considering Semantic Similarity

Abstract

A process model describes business process flow as the activities that employees must carry out. Nowadays, many companies have similar business processes, so they do not establish their process model from scratch but build the model based on an existing process model or a combination of some process models. Several process mining methods approaches matching rules to define similarities of a model, and others consider the semantic side; however, none use the similarity to merge some business process models. This paper proposed graphbased semantic similarity, a method that merges two process models considering the semantic similarity between those activities. The utilized semantic similarity methods are SBERT and TF-IDF. The evaluations compare SBERT and TF-IDF with other methods and use a similarity method with the highest score in graph-based semantic similarity. Based on the semantic similarity score, graph-based semantic similarity with SBERT has higher similarity scores than existing graph-based semantic similarity, i.e., node similarity and Jaro-Winkler distance. With the highest similarity scores among existing methods, the evaluations also prove that graph-based semantic similarity with SBERT correctly combines business process models based on semantic similarity.