Measuring Business Process Behavioral Similarity Based on Token Log Profile

Measuring business process similarity plays an important role in the analysis, management and optimization of business in big companies. In the early days, experts paid major attention to calculating business similarity according to corresponding process models. However, models only express ideal behavior of business processes without any undesired or unexpected business routines. In order to fully model business behavior, some researchers use system logs in similarity measuring. But previous system-logs-based similarity measurements have limitations on: (1) satisfaction of algorithm properties, (2) distribution of similarity values, and (3) complexity of algorithm. In this article, we take the advantages of token logs in process behavioral similarity measuring. Firstly, the Token Log Profile, modeled with a relation matrix, is defined as an abstraction of the initial token logs. Then, similarity between business processes is calculated based on their Token Log Profiles according to the proposed algorithm. Besides, we extend the properties that similarity algorithms should satisfy for evaluating the proposed algorithm. The experimental and analytical results show that our algorithm achieves very promising accuracy and efficiency while satisfying all the proposed properties compared with state-of-the-art algorithms.