关键词: 结构化工作流, 结构树, 工作流距离, 树编辑距离, 相似度

Abstract: For various applications in today’s service-oriented enterprise computing systems, such as process-oriented service discovering or clustering, it is necessary to measure the distance between two process models. In this paper, we propose a quantitative measure to calculate the distance or similarity between different structured processes. We first introduce a structured workflow model and transform each process into a process structure tree, and then calculate the process distance and its similarity based on the tree edit distance of two structure trees. The proposed distance metric satisfies three distance measure properties, i.e., identity of indiscernible, symmetry and triangle inequality. These properties make the distance metric can be used as a quantitative tool in effective process model management activities. Experiment studies show that the method is feasible. Compared to the adjacency matrix method, the proposed method is more reasonable due to the semantic distance between different structures is considered.

Key words: structured workflow, structure tree, workflow distance, tree edit distance, similarity