On the Analysis of Structural Process Variety (Extended Abstract)

Structural process variety is a fundamental characteristic of processes and an important indicator of their complexity, flexibility, and dynamic drifts. It manifests across a wide range of domains, from highly standardized organizational workflows to human behavioral processes. Despite its relevance, existing approaches to measuring process variety lack a rigorous theoretical foundation for capturing structural variety in a meaningful and consistent manner. Drawing on established diversity measurement theories from economics and ecology, the thesis addresses this limitation by conceptualizing structural process variety as a function of pairwise distances between process traces. Building on the derived theory, a measurement framework is proposed that preserves desirable mathematical properties through hierarchical clustering and enables valid and interpretable quantification of structural process variety. To further improve the structural comparison between traces within an event log, the thesis introduces a novel measurement approach for trace similarity. By representing traces as graph structures and extracting common process patterns, the proposed approach captures structural characteristics that are often overlooked by conventional similarity measures, thereby enabling more accurate trace comparisons. ... mehrThe validity of the proposed concepts and measures is demonstrated through two empirical studies. The first study shows how structural process variety can support business process standardization by providing a quantitative basis for evaluating trade-offs between flexibility and efficiency. The second study extends the application of structural process variety and graph-based trace similarity to human behavior analysis, demonstrating their ability to uncover meaningful cognitive patterns in eye-tracking data. Overall, the thesis establishes structural process variety as an analytical construct and provides a foundation for future research on process analytics.