Configurable Business Process Fragments Merging Method Based On Process Trees

In order to meet the needs of complex and diverse applications of enterprises,it is a new trend to build a configurable process model by merging similar business process fragments.In the area of business process management,the process model is usually used to describe business process.A large number of business requirements lead to the business process models becoming very complex.If combine the whole process model directly,it will increase the amount of computation and get an error process model.Therefore,it is of great significance to study the process model which is divided into the block structures and combined with the configuration information to merge.At present,the research on model merging is mainly focused on merging the whole process model directly to get a comprehensive process model.The main consideration is that all the transitions and spaces are included in the integrated process model.However,it will lead to a large number of calculations and higher requirements for the source model.Source model can be found from event logs by process mining technologies.However,the general methods of mining source model may exist the deadlock,livelock and other abnormal behaviors.Between the process trees and Petri nets can realize mutual conversion.The Petri nets which obtained by the process trees transformation do not exist deadlock,livelock and other anomalies.Because of above research background,this paper put forward the process mining technology based on Petri nets,behavior profile,event logs and process trees.This technology finds the process tree from the event logs and combines the configuration information to get a configurable process tree.The main contributions are:(1)A merging method of configurable process trees is proposed based on the event logs.Firstly,this method uses the process mining technology to find the process trees from the sequential relation of traces in the event logs.Secondly,it merges the nodes of the process trees and the directed edges.Finally,a configurable process tree is constructed with configuration information.In order to obtain a more reasonable process model,we propose an algorithm to further optimize the process model.Therefore,the operators on the nodes are configurable merged at the same time.Finally,an optimized configurable process tree is obtained.(2)A merging method of configurable business process fragments is proposed based on the process trees.With the development of information system,a large number of enterprises may perform similar business processes.In order to reduce the amount of labor of modeling designers,we can merge the process models of high degree of similarity with a configurable reference model for designers.Firstly,this method converts the business process models into the process trees according to the control flow structure.Secondly,the process trees are divided into block structures by similarity and the block structures of the two process trees are compared.We merge the highly similar block structures to get a comprehensive process tree.Finally,a configurable process tree and a configurable process fragment which is expressed in BPMN language are obtained by calculating the behavior profile relationships between the block structures in the process trees.