Towards Process Evaluation in Non-Automated Process Execution Environments.
01 Jan 2012-pp 97-103
TL;DR: This paper proposes an architecture that defines event monitoring points: Elementary state transitions of a process instance that are bound to a configuration to discover events from a process agnostic technical environment.
Abstract: Process models gained more and more significance to carry out an organization’s operations. Besides documentation purposes, organizations strive to evaluate their executed processes in terms of performance and conformance. However, this is far from trivial: As most processes are still carried out manually, only few effects can be tracked and are typically not related to process instances. In this paper, we propose an architecture that defines event monitoring points: Elementary state transitions of a process instance that are bound to a configuration to discover events from a process agnostic technical environment. We discuss applications of this architecture, towards monitoring, performance measurement, and execution conformance.
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09 Sep 2013
TL;DR: This work proposes a framework that enriches recorded events with context data to create events correlated to processes, so-called process events, to close the gap between recorded events without process correlation and required events with process correlation.
Abstract: The execution of business processes generates a lot of data comprising final process results as well as information about intermediate activities, both communicated as events. Automated process execution environments are centrally controlled by process engines that hold the connection between events and the processes they occure in. In contrast, in manual process execution environments, e.g., logistics, these events may not be correlated to the process they origin from. The correlation information is usually not present in the event but in so-called context data, which exists orthogonally to the corresponding process. However, in the areas of process monitoring and analysis, events need to be correlated to specific process instances. To close the gap between recorded events without process correlation and required events with process correlation, we propose a framework that enriches recorded events with context data to create events correlated to processes, so-called process events.
48 citations
Cites background from "Towards Process Evaluation in Non-A..."
...[1], [8] for the activity life cycle, which we extend to all nodes of the process model)....
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03 Sep 2012
TL;DR: A novel method to conformance checking that computes fitness of individual activities in the setting of sparse process execution information, i.e., not all activities of a patient's treatment are logged is introduced.
Abstract: Process intelligence is an effective means to analyze and improve business processes in companies with high degree of automation. Hospitals are also facing high pressure to be profitable with ever decreasing available funds in a stressed healthcare sector, which calls for methods to enable process management and intelligent methods in their daily work. However, traditional process intelligence systems work with logs of execution data that is generated by workflow engines controlling the execution of a process. But the nature of the treatment processes requires the doctors to work with a high freedom of action, rendering workflow engines unusable in this context.
In this paper, we introduce a novel method to conformance checking that computes fitness of individual activities in the setting of sparse process execution information, i.e., not all activities of a patient's treatment are logged. We embed this method into a process intelligence approach for hospitals without workflow engines, enabling process monitoring and analysis.
42 citations
Cites methods from "Towards Process Evaluation in Non-A..."
...Based on the resulting model, EMPs have to be defined by the domain experts that can describe when a certain task started or ended [7]....
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...We proposed an architecture for this configuration in an earlier work [7]....
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18 Sep 2016
TL;DR: Event logs are invaluable sources of knowledge about the actual execution of processes, but real life logs are rarely originating from a centrally orchestrated process execution, so case ID might be missing, known as unlabeled log.
Abstract: Event logs are invaluable sources of knowledge about the actual execution of processes. A large number of techniques to mine, check conformance and analyze performance have been developed based on logs. All these techniques require at least case ID, activity ID and the timestamp to be in the log. If one of those is missing, these techniques cannot be applied. Real life logs are rarely originating from a centrally orchestrated process execution. Thus, case ID might be missing, known as unlabeled log. This requires a manual preprocessing of the log to assign case ID to events in the log.
38 citations
13 Jun 2016
TL;DR: This paper proposes an approach to deduce case ID for unlabeled event logs produced from cyclic business processes, and a set of ranked labeled logs are generated.
Abstract: Event logs are invaluable sources about the actual execution of processes. Most of process mining and postmortem analysis techniques depend on logs. All these techniques require the existence of the case ID to correlate the events. Real life logs are rarely originating from a centrally orchestrated process execution. Hence, case ID is missing, known as unlabeled logs. Correlating unlabeled events is a challenging problem that has received little attention in literature. Moreover, the few approaches addressing this challenge support acyclic business processes only. In this paper, we build on our previous work and propose an approach to deduce case ID for unlabeled event logs produced from cyclic business processes. As a result, a set of ranked labeled logs are generated. We evaluate our approach using real life logs.
28 citations
26 Aug 2013
TL;DR: An approach that enables monitoring of business processes with execution data, independently of the structure and source of the event information is presented, by implementing an open source event processing platform combining existing techniques from complex event processing and business process management.
Abstract: Business process monitoring enables a fast and specific overview of the process executions in an enterprise. Traditionally, this kind of monitoring requires a coherent event log. Yet, in reality, execution information is often heterogeneous and distributed. In this paper, we present an approach that enables monitoring of business processes with execution data, independently of the structure and source of the event information. We achieve this by implementing an open source event processing platform combining existing techniques from complex event processing and business process management. Event processing includes transformation for abstraction as well as correlation to process instances and BPMN elements. Monitoring rules are automatically created from BPMN models and executed by the platform.
26 citations
References
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Book•
01 Jan 2011
TL;DR: This book provides real-world techniques for monitoring and analyzing processes in real time and is a powerful new tool destined to play a key role in business process management.
Abstract: The first to cover this missing link between data mining and process modeling, this book provides real-world techniques for monitoring and analyzing processes in real time It is a powerful new tool destined to play a key role in business process management
2,287 citations
Book•
19 Sep 2007
TL;DR: Matthias Weske argues that all communities involved need to have a common understanding of the different aspects of business process management, and details the complete business process lifecycle from the modeling phase to process enactment and improvement, taking into account all different stakeholders involved.
Abstract: Business process management is usually treated from two different perspectives: business administration and computer science. While business administration professionals tend to consider information technology as a subordinate aspect in business process management for experts to handle, by contrast computer science professionals often consider business goals and organizational regulations as terms that do not deserve much thought but require the appropriate level of abstraction. Matthias Weske argues that all communities involved need to have a common understanding of the different aspects of business process management. To this end, he details the complete business process lifecycle from the modeling phase to process enactment and improvement, taking into account all different stakeholders involved. After starting with a presentation of general foundations and abstraction models, he explains concepts like process orchestrations and choreographies, as well as process properties and data dependencies. Finally, he presents both traditional and advanced business process management architectures, covering, for example, workflow management systems, service-oriented architectures, and data-driven approaches. In addition, he shows how standards like WfMC, SOAP, WSDL, and BPEL fit into the picture. This textbook is ideally suited for classes on business process management, information systems architecture, and workflow management. This 2nd edition contains major updates on BPMN Version 2 process orchestration and process choreographies, and the chapter on BPM methodologies has been completely rewritten. The accompanying website www.bpm-book.com contains further information and additional teaching material.
1,825 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, a set of integrated tools that support business and IT users in managing process execution quality by providing several features, such as analysis, prediction, monitoring, control, and optimization.
559 citations
17 Jun 2005
TL;DR: This work describes workflow resource patterns that capture the various ways in which resources are represented and utilised in workflows and uses these patterns as the basis for a detailed comparison of a number of commercially available workflow management systems.
Abstract: In the main, the attention of workflow researchers and workflow developers has focussed on the process perspective, i.e., control-flow. As a result, issues associated with the resource perspective, i.e., the people and machines actually doing the work, have been largely neglected. Although the process perspective is of most significance, appropriate consideration of the resource perspective is essential for successful implementation of workflow technology. Previous work has identified recurring, generic constructs in the control-flow and data perspectives, and presented them in the form of control-flow and data patterns. The next logical step is to describe workflow resource patterns that capture the various ways in which resources are represented and utilised in workflows. These patterns include a number of distinct groupings such as push patterns (“the system pushes work to a worker”) and pull patterns (“the worker pulls work from the system”) to describe the many ways in which work can be distributed. By delineating these patterns in a form that is independent of specific workflow technologies and modelling languages, we are able to provide a comprehensive treatment of the resource perspective and we subsequently use these patterns as the basis for a detailed comparison of a number of commercially available workflow management systems.
505 citations
01 Jun 2011
TL;DR: This paper identifies various ways in which process-related events could be correlated as well as investigate the problem of discovering event correlation (semi-) automatically from service interaction logs and proposes efficient algorithms and heuristics to identify correlated event sets that lead potentially to interesting process views.
Abstract: Understanding, analyzing, and ultimately improving business processes is a goal of enterprises today. These tasks are challenging as business processes in modern enterprises are implemented over several applications and Web services, and the information about process execution is scattered across several data sources. Understanding modern business processes entails identifying the correlation between events in data sources in the context of business processes (event correlation is the process of finding relationships between events that belong to the same process execution instance). In this paper, we investigate the problem of event correlation for business processes that are realized through the interactions of a set of Web services. We identify various ways in which process-related events could be correlated as well as investigate the problem of discovering event correlation (semi-) automatically from service interaction logs. We introduce the concept of process view to represent the process resulting from a certain way of event correlation and that of process space referring to the set of possible process views over process events. Event correlation is a challenging problem as there are various ways in which process events could be correlated, and in many cases, it is subjective. Exploring all the possibilities of correlations is computationally expensive, and only some of the correlated event sets result in process views that are interesting. We propose efficient algorithms and heuristics to identify correlated event sets that lead potentially to interesting process views. To account for its subjectivity, we have designed the event correlation discovery process to be interactive and enable users to guide it toward process views of their interest and organize the discovered process views into a process map that allows users to effectively navigate through the process space and identify the ones of interest. We report on experiments performed on both synthetic and real-world datasets that show the viability and efficiency of the approach.
153 citations