Embedding process structure in activities for process mapping and comparison

Today’s organizations often have to manage hundreds of process models. This requires organizations to be able to efficiently manage process models as a kind of organizational data. Most of previous approaches for process model representation exploit graph data structures to represent (part of) the process control-flow. While these representations work well to analyze the overall process behavior and its KPIs, they are complex data structures which pose some challenges for other kind of analyses requiring, e.g., model comparison. In this paper we explore an alternative approach to representing process structure. We introduce a set of features that describe the context of an activity inside a process, thus embedding the information about the process structure in the activity representation. This representation enables the use of standard vector techniques to capture certain structural similarities among activities and is then suited to support tasks like similarity-based comparison and mapping of processes without resorting to graph-based approaches.