Tool support for process modeling using proximity score measurement

In Business Process Management System (BPMS), process modeling is a troublesome task for a designer with little or insufficient experience. It is widely recognized in practice that only a proficient process designer is able to utilize process modeling tools effectively. Furthermore, although a process modeling tool can be effective in BPMS, a considerable amount of effort is required from enterprises in order to reconfigure business processes for convenient process modeling environments. This paper proposes a proximity score measurement approach to facilitate process modeling. Our approach has three salient features. First, it utilizes a proximity score to provide an analysis about the degree to which an activity is related with another activity in business processes. We argue that this analysis is critical in assisting process designers to initiate their process design with the best possible process reference model. Second, we developed a suite of methods for convenient process modeling, particularly suitable for novice designers, including the method of determining the proximity score measurement (PSM), and the methods of finding the respective process reference model and calculating homogeneity. We demonstrate that a process reference model is a convenient and effective way for a designer lacking experience to be guided to design his own process model. The homogeneity score can help the process designer to determine the suitable class to which a new model may belong. This further facilitates the versioning of the process model. Third but not the least, we develop a prototype of our system and conduct the experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our approach. Our experimental results show that the proximity score measurement approach is efficient and effective for process designers to perform process modeling in BPMS environments.