On the notion of diversity in the context of information aggregation in BPM

Abstract

Assuming a set of diverse process variants, information aggregation is used to provide an aggregated overview of the overall process. The main challenge is to provide a condensed but accurate overview, while avoiding redundant information. Although there exist different approaches for information aggregation, none of them actually consider the diversity of the multiple process variant attributes, such as resources, cost or duration. But this hinders from gaining an overview of the process diversity, i.e. the variance of multiple process attributes. Hence, valuable information regarding resource and time variability can get lost. Diversity measures can be used to evaluate the significance of a single process variant, based on multiple attributes. This short paper introduces existing diversity measures from different research disciplines and elaborates on their application in BPM for the purpose of information aggregation.