Advanced Methods in Business Process Deviance Mining

Äriprotsessi hälve on nähtus, kus alamhulk äriprotsessi täitmistest erinevad soovitud või ettenähtud tulemusest, kas positiivses või negatiivses mõttes. Äriprotsesside hälbega täitmised sisaldavad endas täitmisi, mis ei vasta ettekirjutatud reeglitele või täitmised, mis on jäävad alla või ületavad tulemuslikkuse eesmärke. Hälbekaevandus tegeleb hälbe põhjuste otsimisega, analüüsides selleks äriprotsesside sündmuste logisid.Antud töös lähenetakse protsessihälvete põhjuste otsimise ülesandele, esmalt kasutades järjestikkudel põhinevaid või deklaratiivseid mustreid ning nende kombinatsiooni. Hälbekaevandusest saadud põhjendusi saab parendada, kasutades sündmustes ja sündmusjälgede atribuutides sisalduvaid andmelaste. Andmelastidest konstrueeritakse uued tunnused nii otsekoheselt atribuute ekstraheerides ja agregeerides kui ka andmeteadlike deklaratiivseid piiranguid kasutades. Hälbeid iseloomustavad põhjendused ekstraheeritakse kasutades kaudset ja otsest meetodit reeglite induktsiooniks. Kasutades sünteetilisi ja reaalseid logisid, hinnatakse erinevaid tunnuseid ja tulemuseks saadud otsustusreegleid nii nende võimekuses täpselt eristada hälbega ja hälbeta protsesside täitmiseid kui ka kasutajatele antud lõpptulemustes.Business process deviance refers to the phenomenon whereby a subset of the executions of a business process deviate, in a negative or positive way, with respect to its expected or desirable outcomes. Deviant executions of a business process include those that violate compliance rules, or executions that undershoot or exceed performance targets. Deviance mining is concerned with uncovering the reasons for deviant executions by analyzing business process event logs. In this thesis, the problem of explaining deviations in business processes is first investigated by using features based on sequential and declarative patterns, and a combination of them. The explanations are further improved by leveraging the data payload of events and traces in event logs through features based on pure data attribute values and data-aware declare constraints. The explanations characterizing the deviances are then extracted by direct and indirect methods for rule induction. Using synthetic and real-life logs from multiple domains, a range of feature types and different forms of decision rules are evaluated in terms of their ability to accurately discriminate between non-deviant and deviant executions of a process as well as in terms of the final outcome returned to the users

Language-independent look-ahead for checking multi-perspective declarative process models

Declarative process modelling languages focus on describing a process by restrictions over the behaviour, which must be satisfied throughout the whole process execution. Hence, they are well suited for modelling knowledge-intensive processes with many decision points. However, such models can be hard to read and understand, which affect the modelling and maintenance of the process models tremendously as well as their execution. When executing such declarative (multi-perspective) process models, it may happen that the execution of activities or the change of data values may result in the non-executability of crucial activities. Hence, it would be beneficial to know all consequences of decisions to give recommendations to the process participants. A look-ahead attempts to predict the effects of executing an activity towards possible consequences within an a priori defined time window. The prediction is based on the current state of the process execution, the intended next event and the underlying process model. While execution engines for single-perspective imperative process models already implement such functionality, execution approaches, for multi-perspective declarative process models that involve constraints on data and resources, are less mature. In this paper, we introduce a simulation-based look-ahead approach for multi-perspective declarative process models. This approach transforms the problem of a context-aware process simulation into a SAT problem, by translating a declarative multi-perspective process model and the current state of a process execution into a specification of the logic language Alloy. Via a SAT solver, process trajectories are generated that either satisfy or violate this specification. The simulated process trajectories are used to derive consequences and effects of certain decisions at any time of process execution. We evaluate our approach by means of three examples and give some advice for further optimizations

A Tool for Generating Event Logs from Multi-Perspective Declare Models

The availability of event logs with specific characteristics is nowadays one of the challenges of the process mining field in order to be able to validate and evaluate the proposed techniques. Although some effort has been done towards the generation of synthetic logs from imperative models, the generation of event logs starting from declarative models is still a very young research stream. Few works have focused on the generation of event logs taking into account the control flow perspective or focusing on a particular data attribute as the resources carrying out the activities. However, none of them, so far, has dealt with the generation of event logs from declarative models providing full support for data attributes. MP-Declare Log Generator is a tool for the generation of event logs starting from Multi-Perspective Declare models, a language for expressing declarative constraints on both control flow and data. The implementation of the tool is based on the Alloy model checker and is provided as a standalone desktop application