Research On Workflow Similarity And Process Recommendation

Workflow technology is a description of the repetitive steps of workflow from the abstract point of view.One reason of why we develop the workflow technology is that the computer can produce a paperless work environment.It can be executed completely or semi automatically according to some rules.From the emerging of workflow to present,there have been many workflow products in the market.Since 1990s,the business process management concept and technology has been widely used in many enterprises' information systems.The management system provides a collaborative work environment for enterprises and provides convenience for enterprises' efficient office.The construction of business processes requires a lot of financial and material resources,so the use of workflow reuse technology has become a priority choice for many enterprises.In this paper,we study the similarity comparison of workflow and the process recommendation method based on process similarity.This paper first analyzes the research status of the workflow and the main problems,and then researches the method of measuring the similarity of workflow that based on activity's probability and workflow's structure.Finally this paper studies how to meet the requirements of the user according to the existing constraints,and recommend the optimal process.In order to study the two aspects of this paper,we extend the traditional Petri net,and define a model PTN(Time Petri Net Probabilistic)that can represent the probability and time of the activity in the process.It implements the intuitive description of the time and the probability of the activity in the workflow,which makes the comparison of the workflow and the process recommendation more convenient.Although there are many methods to compare process similarity,but these methods only use partial information to compare the process,namely the control flow dimension information to compare the similarity,not considering the influence of the data flow and information resource flow dimensions,which may leads to the inaccurate comparison results.To solve this problem,this paper studies how to take the data and resource dimensions of process into account and increases the accuracy of workflow similarity measurement method by considering the probability and time constraints of activity.And furthermore,it proposes a process similarity measurement method based on activity's probability and a process recommendation method based on time constraint.The article uses an example of an insurance company's claim process to explain the two aspects of the problem and the solutions more clearly.Finally,the experimental results show that the method is correct and effective.