On the Analysis of Structural Process Variety

Structural process variety is an inherent characteristic of processes across domains, reflecting the degree of similarity and divergence among alternative execution paths. It directly influences process flexibility, standardization, adaptation, and evolution. In Business Process Management (BPM), understanding structural process variety is essential for evaluating process performance and identifying opportunities for improvement. Beyond BPM, the analysis of structural process variety can also provide valuable insights into human behavior and underlying cognitive processes.

Despite its broad relevance, the development of robust, interpretable, and theoretically grounded measures of structural process variety remains a methodological challenge. This work addresses this challenge by adapting established variety measures from economics and ecology to process analysis. It introduces a measurement framework that quantifies structural process variety based on pairwise distances between process traces, ensuring mathematical rigor and measurement validity.

To further strengthen the assessment of structural process variety, this work also advances the measurement of structural similarity between individual process traces. ... mehrExisting trace similarity measures often fail to adequately capture structural relationships between traces. To overcome this limitation, novel graph-based similarity measures are proposed that incorporate edge types as a structural abstraction of process behavior. These measures provide a more accurate and structurally grounded characterization of trace similarity, thereby improving the measurement of process variety.

The proposed measures are evaluated through two empirical studies. The first study demonstrates how structural process variety measures can support business process standardization by identifying trace variants that contribute most to overall variety and by informing decisions on the trade-off between process flexibility and standardization. The second study applies the proposed measures to eye-tracking data and shows that structural process variety and trace similarity provide valuable insights into cognitive effort and information processing. In particular, the proposed similarity measures outperform conventional approaches in detecting transitions between search and inference phases.

Overall, this work presents a theoretically grounded and empirically validated framework for quantifying structural process variety. The framework provides new insights into business process analysis and user behavior analysis.