A Program Component for Heuristic Processes Comparison

In this paper, the problem of comparing business process models is considering and, in particular, the use of heuristic algorithms to solve it is considering as well. Various metrics used to compare process models have been studied. The most popular or interesting languages for modeling business processes are considered. The proposed methods for comparing process models, as well as technical implementations and platforms for comparing business processes, are analyzed. Also, the work provides a detailed description of the four heuristic algorithms chosen for consideration, namely the tabu search algorithm, the simulated annealing algorithm, the genetic algorithm, the ant colony optimization algorithm. These algorithms are considered both in the classical sense and in the context of applicability to the task of structural comparison of business process models. The development object is the software component for heuristic comparison of process models based on the BPMNDiffViz tool. The paper contains 94 pages, 3 sections, 37 illustrations, 1 table, 34 references, 4 appendices. Keywords: business process models, structural comparison of process models, tabu search, simulated annealing, genetic algorithm, ant colony optimization, heuristic algorithms, BPMN, BPMNDiffViz.