Process mining allows analysts to exploit logs of historical executions of business processes to extract insights regarding the actual performance of these processes. One of the most widely studied process mining operations is automated process discovery. An automated process discovery method takes as input an event log, and produces as output a business process model that captures the control-flow relations between tasks that are observed in or implied by the event log. Various automated process discovery methods have been proposed in the past two decades, striking different tradeoffs between scalability, accuracy, and complexity of the resulting models. However, these methods have been evaluated in an ad-hoc manner, employing different datasets, experimental setups, evaluation measures, and baselines, often leading to incomparable conclusions and sometimes unreproducible results due to the use of closed datasets. This article provides a systematic review and comparative evaluation of automated process discovery methods, using an open-source benchmark and covering 12 publicly-available real-life event logs, 12 proprietary real-life event logs, and nine quality metrics. The results highlight gaps and unexplored tradeoffs in the field, including the lack of scalability of some methods and a strong divergence in their performance with respect to the different quality metrics used.

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Automated Discovery of Process Models from Event Logs: Review and Benchmark

A general process mining framework for correlating, predicting and clustering dynamic behavior based on event logs

Process mining allows analysts to exploit logs of historical executions of business processes to extract insights regarding the actual performance of these processes. One of the most widely studied process mining operations is automated process discovery. An automated process discovery method takes as input an event log, and produces as output a business process model that captures the control-flow relations between tasks that are observed in or implied by the event log. Various automated process discovery methods have been proposed in the past two decades, striking different tradeoffs between scalability, accuracy and complexity of the resulting models. However, these methods have been evaluated in an ad-hoc manner, employing different datasets, experimental setups, evaluation measures and baselines, often leading to incomparable conclusions and sometimes unreproducible results due to the use of closed datasets. This article provides a systematic review and comparative evaluation of automated process discovery methods, using an open-source benchmark and covering twelve publicly-available real-life event logs, twelve proprietary real-life event logs, and nine quality metrics. The results highlight gaps and unexplored tradeoffs in the field, including the lack of scalability of some methods and a strong divergence in their performance with respect to the different quality metrics used.

Business Process Management (BPM) includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. It can be considered as an extension of classical Workflow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. Although the practical relevance of BPM is undisputed, a clear definition of BPM and related acronyms such as BAM, BPA, and STP are missing. Moreover, a clear scientific foundation is missing. In this paper, we try to demystify the acronyms in this domain, describe the state-of-the-art technology, and argue that BPM could benefit from formal methods/languages (cf. Petri nets, process algebras, etc.).

Business Process Management: A Survey

Process compliance measurement is getting increasing attention in companies due to stricter legal requirements and market pressure for operational excellence. In order to judge on compliance of the business processing, the degree of behavioural deviation of a case, i.e., an observed execution sequence, is quantified with respect to a process model (referred to as fitness, or recall). Recently, different compliance measures have been proposed. Still, nearly all of them are grounded on state-based techniques and the trace equivalence criterion, in particular. As a consequence, these approaches have to deal with the state explosion problem. In this paper, we argue that a behavioural abstraction may be leveraged to measure the compliance of a process log – a collection of cases. To this end, we utilise causal behavioural profiles that capture the behavioural characteristics of process models and cases, and can be computed efficiently. We propose different compliance measures based on these profiles, discuss the impact of noise in process logs on our measures, and show how diagnostic information on non-compliance is derived. As a validation, we report on findings of applying our approach in a case study with an international service provider.

Process compliance analysis based on behavioural profiles

Process-aware information systems (PAIS) are systems relying on processes, which involve human and software resources to achieve concrete goals. There is a need to develop approaches for modeling, analysis, improvement and monitoring processes within PAIS. These approaches include process mining techniques used to discover process models from event logs, find log and model deviations, and analyze performance characteristics of processes. The representational bias (a way to model processes) plays an important role in process mining. The BPMN 2.0 (Business Process Model and Notation) standard is widely used and allows to build conventional and understandable process models. In addition to the flat control flow perspective, subprocesses, data flows, resources can be integrated within one BPMN diagram. This makes BPMN very attractive for both process miners and business users, since the control flow perspective can be integrated with data and resource perspectives discovered from event logs. In this paper, we describe and justify robust control flow conversion algorithms, which provide the basis for more advanced BPMN-based discovery and conformance checking algorithms. Thus, on the basis of these conversion algorithms low-level models (such as Petri nets, causal nets and process trees) discovered from event logs using existing approaches can be represented in terms of BPMN. Moreover, we establish behavioral relations between Petri nets and BPMN models and use them to adopt existing conformance checking and performance analysis techniques in order to visualize conformance and performance information within a BPMN diagram. We believe that the results presented in this paper can be used for a wide variety of BPMN mining and conformance checking algorithms. We also provide metrics for the processes discovered before and after the conversion to BPMN structures. Cases for which conversion algorithms produce more compact or more complicated BPMN models in comparison with the initial models are identified.

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Process mining using BPMN: relating event logs and process models

Process mining techniques relate observed behavior to modeled behavior, e.g., the automatic discovery of a process model based on an event log. Process mining is not limited to process discovery and also includes conformance checking and model enhancement. Conformance checking techniques are used to diagnose the deviations of the observed behavior as recorded in the event log from some process model. Model enhancement allows to extend process models using additional perspectives, conformance and performance information. In recent years, BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) 2.0 has become a de facto standard for modeling business processes in industry. This paper presents the BPMN support current in ProM. ProM is the most known and used open-source process mining framework. ProM’s functionalities of discovering, analyzing and enhancing BPMN models are discussed. Support of the BPMN 2.0 standard will help ProM users to bridge the gap between formal models (such as Petri nets, causal nets and others) and process models used by practitioners.

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Discovering, analyzing and enhancing BPMN models using ProM

Process mining techniques aim to analyze and improve conformance and performance of processes using event data. Process discovery is the most prominent process-mining task: A process model is derived based on an event log. The process model should be able to capture causalities, choices, concurrency, and loops. Process discovery is very challenging because of trade-offs between fitness, simplicity, precision, and generalization. Note that event logs typically only hold example behavior and cannot be assumed to be complete (to avoid overfitting). Dozens of process discovery techniques have been proposed. These use a wide range of approaches, e.g., language- or state-based regions, genetic mining, heuristics, expectation maximization, iterative log-splitting, etc. When models or logs become too large for analysis, the event log may be automatically decomposed or traces may be clustered before discovery. Clustering and decomposition are done automatically, i.e., no additional information is used. This paper proposes a different approach where a localized event log is assumed. Events are localized by assigning a non-empty set of regions to each event. It is assumed that regions can only interact through shared events. Consider for example the mining of software systems. The events recorded typically explicitly refer to parts of the system (components, services, etc.). Currently, such information is ignored during discovery. However, references to system parts may be used to localize events. Also in other application domains, it is possible to localize events, e.g., communication events in an organization may refer to multiple departments (that may be seen as regions). This paper proposes a generic process discovery approach based on localized event logs. The approach has been implemented in ProM and experimental results show that location information indeed helps to improve the quality of the discovered models.

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Process Discovery Using Localized Events

Automatic comparison of business processes plays an important role in their analysis and optimization. In this paper we present the web-based tool BPMNDiffViz, that finds business processes discrepancies and visualizes them. BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) 2.0 - one of the most commonly used notations for process modeling was chosen as a representation. This tool implements a structural graph-based comparison analysis using an A* algorithm.

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BPMNDiffViz : a tool for BPMN models comparison

Process mining aims to discover and analyze processes by extracting information from event logs. Process mining discovery algorithms deal with large data sets to learn automatically process models. As more event data become available there is the desire to learn larger and more complex process models. To tackle problems related to the readability of the resulting model and to ensure tractability, various decomposition methods have been proposed. This paper presents a novel decomposition approach for discovering more readable models from event logs on the basis of a priori knowledge about the event log structure: regular and special cases of the process execution are treated separately. The transition system, corresponding to a given event log, is decomposed into a regular part and a specific part. Then one of the known discovery algorithms is applied to both parts, and finally these models are combined into a single process model. It is proven, that the structural and behavioral properties of submodels are inherited by the unified process model. The proposed discovery algorithm is illustrated using a running example.

Anna A. Kalenkova

Papers

Process mining using BPMN: relating event logs and process models

Discovering, analyzing and enhancing BPMN models using ProM

Process Discovery Using Localized Events

BPMNDiffViz : a tool for BPMN models comparison

Process model discovery : a method based on transition system decomposition