The analysis of process instance similarity offers valuable input for certain application fields including the evaluation of instance clusters, the identification of compliance abuses, and process optimization. In this paper, we discuss the topic of instance similarity in general: We show that similarity might be determined from different process perspectives such as control flow, time, and instance attributes. Each of these perspectives impose individual requirements on the similarity calculation concerning data and structure. Four metrics for process instance similarity are proposed covering different perspectives. The applicability and feasibility of the proposed metrics are evaluated based on a prototypical implementation and real-world process logs from the BPI challenges.

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