Leveraging Event Data for Measuring Process Complexity

Complexity is an important aspect of business processes. Numerous metrics have been introduced to measure process complexity, however, existing metrics view processes merely as sequences of activities, disregarding the corresponding data. This is a major omission since much of the complexity of business processes stems from the variation of data that is associated with it. In this paper, we refer to recent research on how behavioral complexity of business processes can be defined. More specifically, we extend entropy-based complexity metrics such that they are capable of capturing the variation of event data. We provide some first insights into the implications of applying these newly proposed metrics.