Abstract
Evidence exists that repositories of business process models used in industrial practice contain significant amounts of duplication. This duplication may stem from the fact that the repository describes variants of the same processes and/or because of copy/pasting activity throughout the lifetime of the repository. Previous work has put forward techniques for identifying duplicate fragments (clones) that can be refactored into shared subprocesses. However, these techniques are limited to finding exact clones. This paper analyzes the problem of approximate clone detection and puts forward two techniques for detecting clusters of approximate clones. Experiments show that the proposed techniques are able to accurately retrieve clusters of approximate clones that originate from copy/pasting followed by independent modifications to the copied fragments.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Deissenboeck, F., Hummel, B., Jürgens, E., Schätz, B., Wagner, S., Girard, J.-F., Teuchert, S.: Clone Detection in Automotive Model-based Development. In: ICSE (2008)
Dijkman, R., Dumas, M., García-Bañuelos, L.: Graph Matching Algorithms for Business Process Model Similarity Search. In: Dayal, U., Eder, J., Koehler, J., Reijers, H.A. (eds.) BPM 2009. LNCS, vol. 5701, pp. 48–63. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)
Dijkman, R.M., Dumas, M., van Dongen, B.F., Käärik, R., Mendling, J.: Similarity of business process models: Metrics and evaluation. Inf. Syst. 36(2), 498–516 (2011)
Dijkman, R.M., Gfeller, B., Küster, J.M., Völzer, H.: Identifying refactoring opportunities in process model repositories. Information & Software Technology 53(9), 937–948 (2011)
Jung, J.-Y., Bae, J.: Workflow Clustering Method Based on Process Similarity. In: Gavrilova, M.L., Gervasi, O., Kumar, V., Tan, C.J.K., Taniar, D., Laganá, A., Mun, Y., Choo, H. (eds.) ICCSA 2006. LNCS, vol. 3981, pp. 379–389. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
Keller, G., Teufel, T.: SAP R/3 Process Oriented Implementation: Iterative Process Prototyping. Addison-Wesley (1998)
Koschke, R.: Identifying and Removing Software Clones. In: Software Evolution. Springer (2008)
La Rosa, M., Reijers, H.A., van der Aalst, W.M.P., Dijkman, R.M., Mendling, J., Dumas, M., García-Bañuelos, L.: APROMORE: An Advanced Process Model Repository. Expert Systems With Applications 38(6) (2011)
Li, C., Reichert, M., Wombacher, A.: The minadept clustering approach for discovering reference process models out of process variants. IJCIS 19(3-4), 159–203 (2010)
Melcher, J., Seese, D.: Visualization and clustering of business process collections based on process metric values. In: SYNASC. IEEE (2008)
Messmer, B.T.: Efficient Graph Matching Algorithms. PhD thesis, Switzerland (1995)
Pham, N.H., Nguyen, H.A., Nguyen, T.T., Al-Kofahi, J.M., Nguyen, T.N.: Complete and Accurate Clone Detection in Graph-based Models. In: ICSE, pp. 276–286. IEEE (2009)
Polyvyanyy, A., Vanhatalo, J., Völzer, H.: Simplified Computation and Generalization of the Refined Process Structure Tree. In: WSFM (2010)
Storrle, H.: Towards clone detection in UML domain models. Software and Systems Modeling (2011) (on-line)
Tan, P.-N., Steinbach, M., Kumar, V.: Introduction to Data Mining. Addison-Wesley (2005)
Uba, R., Dumas, M., García-Bañuelos, L., La Rosa, M.: Clone Detection in Repositories of Business Process Models. In: Rinderle-Ma, S., Toumani, F., Wolf, K. (eds.) BPM 2011. LNCS, vol. 6896, pp. 248–264. Springer, Heidelberg (2011)
Vanhatalo, J., Völzer, H., Koehler, J.: The Refined Process Structure Tree. Data Knowl. Eng. 68(9), 793–818 (2009)
Weber, B., Reichert, M., Mendling, J., Reijers, H.A.: Refactoring large process model repositories. Computers in Industry 62(5), 467–486 (2011)
Zhao, Y., Karypis, G.: Evaluation of hierarchical clustering algorithms for document datasets. In: CIKM, pp. 515–524. ACM (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Ekanayake, C.C., Dumas, M., García-Bañuelos, L., La Rosa, M., ter Hofstede, A.H.M. (2012). Approximate Clone Detection in Repositories of Business Process Models. In: Barros, A., Gal, A., Kindler, E. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7481. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32885-5_24
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32885-5_24
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-32884-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-32885-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)