Combination usage of process mining and adaptive case management

Process mining performs well on structured processes like BPM. In recent years, Adaptive Case Management (ACM) was introduced to support knowledge workers by giving them the permission to define processes on the fly in unpredictable situations. By doing so, processes seem to be unstructured and hard to be enhanced. The goal of this thesis is to analyze how process mining can improve and benefit unstructured processes and to develop a prototype for a potential application. The scenario analysis focuses on (1) supporting knowledge workers with process mining, (2) transiting from unstructured to structured processes through process mining, and (3) compliance regulations in unstructured processes through process mining. One scenario is selected based on the analysis for implementing a prototype. Due to the importance of compliance regulations and rare researches on compliance regulations in unstructured processes, the scenario (3) is selected and an approach of compliance checking for unstructured processes using process mining is proposed. The prototype of the approach leverages process mining to discover hidden structured in unstructured processes and implements compliance checking functionalities consisting of graphical rule definition, rule creation and rule checking on a log in Oryx platform. The prototype visualizes violating paths on the process model and reports all violating process instances. The evaluation proves that the prototype is indeed capable of compliance checking with a large real-life data log

An universal approach for compliance management using compliance descriptors

Trends like outsourcing and cloud computing have led to a distribution of business processes among different IT systems and organizations. Still, businesses need to ensure compliance regarding laws and regulations of these distributed processes. This need gave way to many new solutions for compliance management and checking. Compliance requirements arise from legal documents and are implemented in all parts of enterprise IT, creating a business IT gap between legal texts and software implementation. Compliance solutions must bridge this gap as well as support a wide variety of compliance requirements. To achieve these goals, we developed an integrating compliance descriptor for compliance modeling on the legal, requirement and technical level, incorporating arbitrary rule languages for specific types of requirements. Using a modeled descriptor a compliance checking architecture can be configured, including specific rule checking implementations. The graphical notation of the compliance descriptor and the formalism it’s based on are described and evaluated using a prototype as well as expert interviews. Based on evaluation results, an extension for compliance management in unstructured processes is outlined