Comparison and Variability Analysis in Process Variants

The co-existence of multiple variants of a same process is a common phenomenon in process repositories of organizations. To manage these process variants effectively, it is necessary to compare them against each other and identify the commonalities and differences between them. However, existing process matching techniques are mostly limited to a comparison between two process variants only. Comparing a set of process variants to identify common and variant elements becomes thus a major challenge. In this paper, we propose the Process Variants Comparison (ProVC) method to compare and analyze variability between a set of process variants rather than binary comparison of two variants. An intuitive and intelligible visualization of the comparison result is then provided to users in the form of presence and relative position of nodes in process variants. The accuracy and usability of the ProVC method are demonstrated by a case study and user experiment in an application scenario.