Overcoming individual process model matcher weaknesses using ensemble matching

Publication date: Available online 2 March 2017
Source:Decision Support Systems
Author(s): Christian Meilicke, Henrik Leopold, Elena Kuss, Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Hajo A. Reijers
In recent years, a considerable number of process model matching techniques have been proposed. The goal of these techniques is to identify correspondences between the activities of two process models. However, the results from the Process Model Matching Contest 2015 reveal that there is still no universally applicable matching technique and that each technique has particular strengths and weaknesses. It is hard or even impossible to choose the best technique for a given matching problem. We propose to cope with this problem by running an ensemble of matching techniques and automatically selecting a subset of the generated correspondences. To this end, we propose a Markov Logic based optimization approach that automatically selects the best correspondences. The approach builds on an adaption of a voting technique from the domain of schema matching and combines it with process model specific constraints. Our experiments show that our approach is capable of generating results that are significantly better than alternative approaches.