PBI: A Path-Based Bitmap Index for Efficient Process Analysis in Cloud Computing Environment

Business process management(BPM), contributes to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes for a lot of important applications, such as banking, medical field. The business process is usually described by Petri net, BPMN, and other modeling languages, and the model structure also confirms all instances produced by these networks. Queries and analysis of instances are mainly querying the path and attributes on the graph model. However, almost all instances are stored in the relational database from practical applications and lost their original path information indeed, which can not support efficient route query. This is the main reason for the bottleneck of process analysis performance, especially in big data era. This paper proposed a path-based bitmap index named PBI, providing fast path querying for process instances in the Cloud, without changing the original relational schema. Meanwhile, with the help of utilizing the parallel computing resources provided by the Cloud, the query efficiency is dramatically improved. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on real data. The results demonstrate that our approach can significantly outperform the method without our index.