Clone detection in repositories of business process models

Abstract

Over time, process model repositories tend to accumulate duplicate fragments (also called clones) as new process models are created or extended by copying and merging fragments from other models. This phenomenon calls for methods to detect clones in process models, so that these clones can be refactored as separate subprocesses in order to improve maintainability. This paper presents an indexing structure to support the fast detection of clones in large process model repositories. The proposed index is based on a novel combination of a method for process model decomposition (specifically the Refined Process Structure Tree), with established graph canonization and string matching techniques. ..