21 research outputs found
Artifact Lifecycle Discovery
Artifact-centric modeling is a promising approach for modeling business
processes based on the so-called business artifacts - key entities driving the
company's operations and whose lifecycles define the overall business process.
While artifact-centric modeling shows significant advantages, the overwhelming
majority of existing process mining methods cannot be applied (directly) as
they are tailored to discover monolithic process models. This paper addresses
the problem by proposing a chain of methods that can be applied to discover
artifact lifecycle models in Guard-Stage-Milestone notation. We decompose the
problem in such a way that a wide range of existing (non-artifact-centric)
process discovery and analysis methods can be reused in a flexible manner. The
methods presented in this paper are implemented as software plug-ins for ProM,
a generic open-source framework and architecture for implementing process
mining tools
Towards the Discovery of Object-Aware Processes
There has been a huge body of research in order to reduce manual efforts in creating executable process models through the automated discovery of process models from the event logs created by information systems. Regarding activity-centric processes, such event logs comprise case ids and events related to the execution of process activities. However, there exist alternative process management paradigms, such as object-aware processes, for which existing algorithms fail to discover a sound model. These algorithms do not treat data as first-class citizens, but solely rely on the information from event logs. In consequence, existing discovery algorithms are insufficient for discovering object-aware processes. To address this issue, discovery algorithms need to consider additional data sources (e.g., existing forms). This paper discusses the need for dedicated discovery techniques in object-aware processes
Guided Interaction Exploration in Artifact-centric Process Models
Artifact-centric process models aim to describe complex processes as a
collection of interacting artifacts. Recent development in process mining allow
for the discovery of such models. However, the focus is often on the
representation of the individual artifacts rather than their interactions.
Based on event data we can automatically discover composite state machines
representing artifact-centric processes. Moreover, we provide ways of
visualizing and quantifying interactions among different artifacts. For
example, we are able to highlight strongly correlated behaviours in different
artifacts. The approach has been fully implemented as a ProM plug-in; the CSM
Miner provides an interactive artifact-centric process discovery tool focussing
on interactions. The approach has been evaluated using real life data sets,
including the personal loan and overdraft process of a Dutch financial
institution.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, to be published in proceedings of the 19th IEEE
Conference on Business Informatics, CBI 201
Monitoring interactions across multi business processes with token carried data
The rapid development of web service provides many opportunities for companies to migrate their business processes to the Internet for wider accessibility and higher collaboration efficiency. However, the open, dynamic and ever-changing Internet also brings challenges in protecting these business processes. There are certain process monitoring methods and the recently proposed ones are based on state changes of process artifacts or places, however, they do not mention defending process interactions from outer tampering, where events could not be detected by process systems, or saving fault-handling time. In this paper, we propose a novel Token-based Interaction Monitoring framework based on token carried data to safeguard process collaboration and reduce problem solving time. Token is a more common data entity in processes than process artifacts and they cover all tasks’ executions. Comparing to detecting places’ state change, we set security checking points at both when tokens are just produced and to be consumed. This will ensure that even if data is tampered after being created it would be detected before being used
Conformance checking in UML artifact-centric business process models
Business artifacts have appeared as a new paradigm to capture the information required for the complete execution and reasoning of a business process. Likewise, conformance checking is gaining popularity as a crucial technique that enables evaluating whether recorded executions of a process match its corresponding model. In this paper, conformance checking techniques are incorporated into a general framework to specify business artifacts. By relying on the expressive power of an artifact-centric specification, BAUML, which combines UML state and activity diagrams (among others), the problem of conformance checking can be mapped into the Petri net formalism and its results be explained in terms of the original artifact-centric specification. In contrast to most existing approaches, ours incorporates data constraints into the Petri nets, thus achieving conformance results which are more precise. We have also implemented a plug-in, within the ProM framework, which is able to translate a BAUML into a Petri net to perform conformance checking. This shows the feasibility of our approach.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Advancements and Challenges in Object-Centric Process Mining: A Systematic Literature Review
Recent years have seen the emergence of object-centric process mining
techniques. Born as a response to the limitations of traditional process mining
in analyzing event data from prevalent information systems like CRM and ERP,
these techniques aim to tackle the deficiency, convergence, and divergence
issues seen in traditional event logs. Despite the promise, the adoption in
real-world process mining analyses remains limited. This paper embarks on a
comprehensive literature review of object-centric process mining, providing
insights into the current status of the discipline and its historical
trajectory