A comparative survey of business process similarity measures

Similarity measures for business process models have been suggested for different purposes such as measuring compliance between reference and actual models, searching for related models in a repository, or locating services that adhere to a specification given by a process model. The aim of our article is to provide a comprehensive survey on techniques to define and calculate such similarity measures.As the measures differ in many aspects, it is an interesting question how different measures rank “similarity” within the same set of models. We investigated, how different kinds of changes in a model influence the values of different similarity measures that have been published in academic literature.Furthermore, we identified eight properties that a similarity measure should have from a theoretical point of view and analysed how these properties are fulfilled by the different measures. Our results show that there are remarkable differences among existing measures.We give some recommendations which type of measure is useful for which kind of application.