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

Clinical Processes - The Killer Application for Constraint-Based Process Interactions?

For more than a decade, the interest in aligning information systems in a process-oriented way has been increasing. To enable operational support for business processes, the latter are usually specified in an imperative way. The resulting process models, however, tend to be too rigid to meet the flexibility demands of the actors involved. Declarative process modeling languages, in turn, provide a promising alternative in scenarios in which a high level of flexibility is demanded. In the scientific literature, declarative languages have been used for modeling rather simple processes or synthetic examples. However, to the best of our knowledge, they have not been used to model complex, real-world scenarios that comprise constraints going beyond control-flow. In this paper, we propose the use of a declarative language for modeling a sophisticated healthcare process scenario from the real world. The scenario is subject to complex temporal constraints and entails the need for coordinating the constraint-based interactions among the processes related to a patient treatment process. As demonstrated in this work, the selected real process scenario can be suitably modeled through a declarative approach.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

Knowledge-Intensive Processes: Characteristics, Requirements and Analysis of Contemporary Approaches

Engineering of knowledge-intensive processes (KiPs) is far from being mastered, since they are genuinely knowledge- and data-centric, and require substantial flexibility, at both design- and run-time. In this work, starting from a scientific literature analysis in the area of KiPs and from three real-world domains and application scenarios, we provide a precise characterization of KiPs. Furthermore, we devise some general requirements related to KiPs management and execution. Such requirements contribute to the definition of an evaluation framework to assess current system support for KiPs. To this end, we present a critical analysis on a number of existing process-oriented approaches by discussing their efficacy against the requirements

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

Data-Aware Declarative Process Mining with SAT

Process Mining is a family of techniques for analyzing business process execution data recorded in event logs. Process models can be obtained as output of automated process discovery techniques or can be used as input of techniques for conformance checking or model enhancement. In Declarative Process Mining, process models are represented as sets of temporal constraints (instead of procedural descriptions where all control-flow details are explicitly modeled). An open research direction in Declarative Process Mining is whether multi-perspective specifications can be supported, i.e., specifications that not only describe the process behavior from the control-flow point of view, but also from other perspectives like data or time. In this paper, we address this question by considering SAT (Propositional Satisfiability Problem) as a solving technology for a number of classical problems in Declarative Process Mining, namely log generation, conformance checking and temporal query checking. To do so, we first express each problem as a suitable FO (First-Order) theory whose bounded models represent solutions to the problem, and then find a bounded model of such theory by compilation into SAT

A framework for efficiently mining the organisational perspective of business processes

Process mining aims at discovering processes by extracting knowledge from event logs. Such knowledge may refer to different business process perspectives. The organisational perspective deals, among other things, with the assignment of human resources to process activities. Information about the resources that are involved in process activities can be mined from event logs in order to discover resource assignment conditions, which is valuable for process analysis and redesign. Prior process mining approaches in this context present one of the following issues: (i) they are limited to discovering a restricted set of resource assignment conditions; (ii) they do not aim at providing efficient solutions; or (iii) the discovered process models are difficult to read due to the number of assignment conditions included. In this paper we address these problems and develop an efficient and effective process mining framework that provides extensive support for the discovery of patterns related to resource assignment. The framework is validated in terms of performance and applicability

Process mining meets model learning: Discovering deterministic finite state automata from event logs for business process analysis

Within the process mining field, Deterministic Finite State Automata (DFAs) are largely employed as foundation mechanisms to perform formal reasoning tasks over the information contained in the event logs, such as conformance checking, compliance monitoring and cross-organization process analysis, just to name a few. To support the above use cases, in this paper, we investigate how to leverage Model Learning (ML) algorithms for the automated discovery of DFAs from event logs. DFAs can be used as a fundamental building block to support not only the development of process analysis techniques, but also the implementation of instruments to support other phases of the Business Process Management (BPM) lifecycle such as business process design and enactment. The quality of the discovered DFAs is assessed wrt customized definitions of fitness, precision, generalization, and a standard notion of DFA simplicity. Finally, we use these metrics to benchmark ML algorithms against real-life and synthetically generated datasets, with the aim of studying their performance and investigate their suitability to be used for the development of BPM tools