Automatic Extraction of Process Categories from Process Model Collections

Many organizations build up their business process management activities in an incremental way. As a result, there is no overarching structure defined at the beginning. However, as business process modeling initiatives often yield hundreds to thousands of process models, there is a growing need for such a structure. This challenge calls for a technique to extract process categories from a set of process models automatically which yields an up-to-date view of the structure of a collection of process models. It also provides a means to check whether pre-defined process categories are still reasonable. In this paper, we introduce a technique for automatically extracting process categories from process model collections and test it using a collection from industry. The results demonstrate the usefulness of the technique by revealing issues of the preexisting process categories. In this way, we contribute to the field of process model management and quality assurance.