Generation of Business Process Reference Model Considering Multiple Objectives

The implementation of business process management (BPM) systems in large number of business organizations transforms BPM system into such a level of maturity and tends to collect large repositories of business process (BP) models. This issue encourages BP flexibility that leads to a large number of process variants derived from the same model, but differing in structure, to be stored in the large repositories of BP models. Therefore, the repositories may include thousands of activities and related business objects with variation of requirements and quality of service. It is a common practice to customize processes from reference processes or templates in order to reduce the time and effort required to design and deploy processes on all levels. In order to address redundancy and underutilization problems, a generic process model, called as reference BP, is absolutely necessary to cover the best of process variants. This study aims to develop multiple-objective business process genetic algorithm (MOBPGA) to find a set of non-dominated (Pareto) solutions of business reference model to enhance conventional approach which considered only a single objective on creating BP reference model by using proximity score measurement. A mixed-integer linear program is constructed to evaluate performance of the proposed MOBPGA on small-scale problems by using standard measures for multiple-objective techniques. The results will show the viability of applying MOBPGA in terms of simultaneously maximizing proximity score measurement, minimizing total duration, and total costs of the selected reference model.