Inductive Development of Reference Process Models Based on Factor Analysis

Business Process Modeling has become a major task in the field of Business Process Management. There has been a trend within organizations to- wards adapting and reusing existing reference models for the modeling of indi- vidual business processes that belong to the same application domain to save time and costs. Due to the high availability of individual business process mod- els together with the need for further reference models, the inductive develop- ment of reference models has gained tremendous importance. Meanwhile, dif- ferent heuristic approaches have been proposed to the research community, based on median graph computation. By way of contrast, our approach tries to derive reference models based on factor analysis, which does not require an ap- proximated matching between the individual business processes as an additional level of abstraction. The results of the described approach are compared to the results of an existing heuristic approach for a qualitative evaluation of both in- ductive development concepts.