Conformance Checking Based on Multi-Perspective Declarative Process Models

Process mining is a family of techniques that aim at analyzing business process execution data recorded in event logs. Conformance checking is a branch of this discipline embracing approaches for verifying whether the behavior of a process, as recorded in a log, is in line with some expected behaviors provided in the form of a process model. The majority of these approaches require the input process model to be procedural (e.g., a Petri net). However, in turbulent environments, characterized by high variability, the process behavior is less stable and predictable. In these environments, procedural process models are less suitable to describe a business process. Declarative specifications, working in an open world assumption, allow the modeler to express several possible execution paths as a compact set of constraints. Any process execution that does not contradict these constraints is allowed. One of the open challenges in the context of conformance checking with declarative models is the capability of supporting multi-perspective specifications. In this paper, we close this gap by providing a framework for conformance checking based on MP-Declare, a multi-perspective version of the declarative process modeling language Declare. The approach has been implemented in the process mining tool ProM and has been experimented in three real life case studies

Data-aware Synthetic Log Generation for Declarative Process Models

Äriprotsesside juhtimises on protsessikaeve klass meetodeid, mida kasutatakse protsessi struktuuri õppimiseks täitmislogist. Selle struktuur on esindatud kui protsessi mudel: kas menetluslik või deklaratiivne. Näited deklaratiivsetest keeltest on Declare, DPIL ja DCR Graphs. Selleks, et testida ja parandada protsessi kaevandamise algoritme on vaja palju logisid erinevate parameetritega ja alati ei ole võimalik saada piisavalt reaalseid logisid. See on koht, kus tehislikud logid tulevad kasuks. On olemas meetodeid logi genereerimiseks DPIL-ist ja deklaratiivsetest mudelitest, kuid puuduvad vahendid logi genereerimiseks MPDeclare-ist, mis on multiperspektiivne versioon Declare-ist andmete toega. Käesolev magistritöö käsitleb MP-Declare mudelitest logide genereerimist kasutades kaht erinevat mudelite kontrollijat: Alloy ja NuSMV. Selleks, et parandada jõudlust, optimeerisime kirjanduses saadaval olevaid baaslähenemisi. Kõik käsitletud tehnikad implementeeritakse ja testitakse kasutades saadaval olevat sobivuse testimise tööriistu ja meie enda väljatöötatud teste. Meie generaatorite hindamiseks ja võrdluseks olemasolevate lahendustega mõõtsime me logide genereerimise aega ja seda, kuidas see muutub erinevate parameetrite ja mudelitega. Me töötasime välja erinevad mõõdupuud logide varieeruvuse arvutamiseks ja rakendasime neid uuritavatele generaatoritele.In Business Process Management, process mining is a class of techniques for learning process structure from an execution log. This structure is represented as a process model: either procedural or declarative. Examples of declarative languages are Declare, DPIL and DCR Graphs. In order to test and improve process mining algorithms a lot of logs with different parameters are required, and it is not always possible to get enough real logs. And this is where artificial logs are useful. There exist techniques for log generation from DPIL and declare-based models. But there are no tools for generating logs from MP-Declare – multiperspective version of Declare with data support. This thesis introduces an approach to log generation from MP-Declare models using two different model checkers: Alloy and NuSMV. In order to improve performance, we applied optimization to baseline approaches available in the literature. All of the discussed techniques are implemented and tested using existing conformance checking tools and our tests. To evaluate performance of our generators and compare them with existing ones, we measured time required for generating log and how it changes with different parameters and models. We also designed several metrics for computing log variability, and applied them to reviewed generators

Conformance checking: A state-of-the-art literature review

Conformance checking is a set of process mining functions that compare process instances with a given process model. It identifies deviations between the process instances' actual behaviour ("as-is") and its modelled behaviour ("to-be"). Especially in the context of analyzing compliance in organizations, it is currently gaining momentum -- e.g. for auditors. Researchers have proposed a variety of conformance checking techniques that are geared towards certain process model notations or specific applications such as process model evaluation. This article reviews a set of conformance checking techniques described in 37 scholarly publications. It classifies the techniques along the dimensions "modelling language", "algorithm type", "quality metric", and "perspective" using a concept matrix so that the techniques can be better accessed by practitioners and researchers. The matrix highlights the dimensions where extant research concentrates and where blind spots exist. For instance, process miners use declarative process modelling languages often, but applications in conformance checking are rare. Likewise, process mining can investigate process roles or process metrics such as duration, but conformance checking techniques narrow on analyzing control-flow. Future research may construct techniques that support these neglected approaches to conformance checking

Leveraging Multi-Perspective A priori Knowledge in Predictive Business Process Monitoring

Äriprotsesside ennestusseire on valdkond, mis on pühendunud käimasolevate äriprotsesside tuleviku ennustamisele kasutades selleks minevikus sooritatud äriprotsesside kohta käivaid andmeid. Valdav osa uurimustööst selles valdkonnas keskendub ainult seda tüüpi andmetele, jättes tähelepanuta täiendavad teadmised (a priori teadmised) protsessi teostumise kohta tulevikus. Hiljuti pakuti välja lähenemine, mis võimaldab a priori teadmisi kasutada LTL-reeglite näol. Kuid tõsiasjana on antud tehnika limiteeritud äriprotsessi kontroll-voole, jättes välja võimaluse väljendada a priori teadmisi, mis puudutavad lisaks kontrollvoole ka informatsiooni protsessis leiduvate atribuutide kohta (multiperspektiivsed a priori teadmised). Me pakume välja lahenduse, mis võimaldab seda tüüpi teadmiste kasutuse, tehes multiperspektiivseid ennustusi käimasoleva äriprotsessi kohta. Tulemused, milleni jõuti rakendades väljapakutud tehnikat 20-le tehisärilogile ning ühele elulisele ärilogile, näitavad, et meie lähenemine suudab pakkuda konkurentsivõimelisi ennustusi.Predictive business process monitoring is an area dedicated to exploiting past process execution data in order to predict the future unfolding of a currently executed business process instance. Most of the research done in this domain focuses on exploiting the past process execution data only, leaving neglected additional a priori knowledge that might become available at runtime. Recently, an approach was proposed, which allows to leverage a priori knowledge on the control flow in the form of LTL-rules. However, cases exist in which more granular a priori knowledge becomes available about perspectives that go be-yond the pure control flow like data, time and resources (multiperspective a priori knowledge). In this thesis, we propose a technique that enables to leverage multi-perspective a priori knowledge when making predictions of complex sequences, i.e., sequences of events with a subset of the data attributes attached to them. The results, obtained by applying the proposed technique to 20 synthetic logs and 1 real life log, show that the proposed technique is able to overcome state-of-the-art approaches by successfully leveraging multiperspective a priori knowledge

Process Mining Handbook

This is an open access book. This book comprises all the single courses given as part of the First Summer School on Process Mining, PMSS 2022, which was held in Aachen, Germany, during July 4-8, 2022. This volume contains 17 chapters organized into the following topical sections: Introduction; process discovery; conformance checking; data preprocessing; process enhancement and monitoring; assorted process mining topics; industrial perspective and applications; and closing

Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for Process Mining (Technical Report)

This technical report describes the intersection of process mining and large language models (LLMs), specifically focusing on the abstraction of traditional and object-centric process mining artifacts into textual format. We introduce and explore various prompting strategies: direct answering, where the large language model directly addresses user queries; multi-prompt answering, which allows the model to incrementally build on the knowledge obtained through a series of prompts; and the generation of database queries, facilitating the validation of hypotheses against the original event log. Our assessment considers two large language models, GPT-4 and Google's Bard, under various contextual scenarios across all prompting strategies. Results indicate that these models exhibit a robust understanding of key process mining abstractions, with notable proficiency in interpreting both declarative and procedural process models. In addition, we find that both models demonstrate strong performance in the object-centric setting, which could significantly propel the advancement of the object-centric process mining discipline. Additionally, these models display a noteworthy capacity to evaluate various concepts of fairness in process mining. This opens the door to more rapid and efficient assessments of the fairness of process mining event logs, which has significant implications for the field. The integration of these large language models into process mining applications may open new avenues for exploration, innovation, and insight generation in the field

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