On the use of domain knowledge for process model repair

Process models are important for supporting organizations in documenting, understanding and monitoring their business. When these process models become outdated, they need to be revised to accurately describe the new status quo of the processes in the organization. Process model repair techniques help at automatically revising the existing model from behavior traced in event logs. So far, such techniques have focused on identifying which parts of the model to change and how to change them, but they do not use knowledge from practitioners to inform the revision. As a consequence, fragments of the model may change in a way that defies existing regulations or represents outdated information that was wrongly considered from the event log. This paper uses concepts from theory revision to provide formal foundations for process model repair that exploits domain knowledge. Specifically, it conceptualizes (1) what are unchangeable fragments in the model and (2) the role that various traces in the event log should play when it comes to model repair. A scenario of use is presented that demonstrates the benefits of this conceptualization. The current state of existing process model repair techniques is compared against the proposed concepts. The results show that only two existing techniques partially consider the concepts presented in this paper for model repair.Peer Reviewe

Process Mining Contributions to Discrete-event Simulation Modelling

Background: Over the last 20 years, process mining has become a vibrant research area due to the advances in data management technologies and techniques and the advent of new process mining tools. Recently, the links between process mining and simulation modelling have become an area of interest. Objectives: The objective of the paper was to demonstrate and assess the role of process mining results as an input for discrete-event simulation modelling, using two different datasets, one of which is considered data-poor while the other one data-rich. Methods/Approach: Statistical calculations and process maps were prepared and presented based on the event log data from two case studies (smart mobility and higher education) using a process mining tool. Then, the implications of the results across the building blocks (entities, activities, control-flows, and resources) of simulation modelling are discussed. Results: Apart from providing a rationale and the framework for simulation that is more efficient modelling based on process mining results, the paper provides contributions in the two case studies by deliberating and identifying potential research topics that could be tackled and supported by the new combined approach. Conclusions: Event logs and process mining provide valuable information and techniques that could be a useful input for simulation modelling, especially in the first steps of building discrete-event models, but also for validation purposes

Discovering Declarative Process Models from Event Logs through Temporal Logic Query Checking

Käesolev magistritöö keskendub protsessile seatud piirangute avastamisele sündmuste logist, mida saab väljendada temporaalloogika abil. Piirangute avastamise meetodina kasutame temporaalloogika päringute kontrollimist sündmuste logi vastu. Temporaalloogika päring on modaalloogika avaldis, mis sisaldab muutujaid, mis võtavad oma väärtuse automaarpropositsioonide hulgast. Temporaalloogika päring käivitatakse vastu olekumasinat, mis on konstrueeritud sündmuste logi järgi. Päringu tulemuseks on kõik temporaalloogika avaldised, kus muutujad on asendatud kõikvõimalike automaarpropositsioonidega, mis muudavad avaldise tõeseks antud olekumasinas. See meetod ei vaja protsessi piirangute avastamiseks negatiivseid näiteid (protsessi juhtumid, mis ei tohi aset leida) sündmuste logis nagu osa avaldatuid meetodeid vajab. See meetod samuti laiendab võimalike avastatavate piirangute hulka võrreldes olemas olevate meetoditega.This thesis will focus on the discovery of temporal logic constraints from an event log. The constraints are the description of the behavior of a business process. We will use Temporal Logic Query Checking for this purpose. A temporal logic query is a type of modal logic expression containing one or more placeholders that are checked against a transition system. The transition system is built from an event log. The result lists all possible activities that can replace the placeholders to satisfy the constraints described by the query in the log. This approach does not require (as many other approaches in the literature) negative examples as (additional) input and it provides the possibility of discovering a wider range of constraints to describe the process with respect to the existing approaches

Automated Process Discovery: A Literature Review and a Comparative Evaluation with Domain Experts

Äriprotsesside kaeve meetodi võimaldavad analüütikul kasutada logisid saamaks teadmisi protsessi tegeliku toimise kohta. Neist meetodist üks enim uuritud on automaatne äriprotsesside avastamine. Sündmuste logi võetakse kui sisend automaatse äriprotsesside avastamise meetodi poolt ning väljundina toodetakse äriprotsessi mudel, mis kujutab logis talletatud sündmuste kontrollvoogu. Viimase kahe kümnendi jooksul on väljapakutud mitmeidki automaatseid äriprotsessi avastamise meetodeid balansseerides erinevalt toodetavate mudelite skaleeruvuse, täpsuse ning keerukuse vahel. Siiani on automaatsed äriprotsesside avastamise meetodid testitud ad-hoc kombel, kus erinevad autorid kasutavad erinevaid andmestike, seadistusi, hindamismeetrikuid ning alustõdesid, mis viib tihti võrdlematute tulemusteni ning mõnikord ka mittetaastoodetavate tulemusteni suletud andmestike kasutamise tõttu. Eelpool toodu mõistes sooritatakse antud magistritöö raames süstemaatiline kirjanduse ülevaade automaatsete äriprotsesside avastamise meetoditest ja ka süstemaatiline hindav võrdlus üle nelja kvaliteedimeetriku olemasolevate automaatsete äriprotsesside avastamise meetodite kohta koostöös domeeniekspertidega ning kasutades reaalset logi rahvusvahelisest tarkvara firmast. Kirjanduse ülevaate ning hindamise tulemused tõstavad esile puudujääke ning seni uurimata kompromisse mudelite loomiseks nelja kvaliteedimeetriku kontekstis. Antud magistritöö tulemused võimaldavad teaduritel parandada puudujäägid meetodites. Samuti vastatakse küsimusele automaatsete äriprotsesside avastamise meetodite kasutamise kohta väljaspool akadeemilist maailma.Process mining methods allow analysts to use logs of historical executions of business processes in order to gain knowledge about the actual performance of these processes.One of the most widely studied process mining operations is automated process discovery.An event log is taken as input by an automated process discovery method and produces a business process model as output that captures the control-flow relations between tasks that are described by the event log.Several automated process discovery methods have been proposed in the past two decades, striking different tradeoffs between scalability, accuracy and complexity of the resulting models.So far, automated process discovery methods have been evaluated in an ad hoc manner, with different authors employing different datasets, experimental setups, evaluation measures and baselines, often leading to incomparable conclusions and sometimes unreproducible results due to the use of non-publicly available datasets.In this setting, this thesis provides a systematic review of automated process discovery methods and a systematic comparative evaluation of existing implementations of these methods with domain experts by using a real-life event log extracted from a international software engineering company and four quality metrics.The review and evaluation results highlight gaps and unexplored tradeoffs in the field in the context of four business process model quality metrics.The results of this master thesis allows researchers to improve the lacks in the automated process discovery methods and also answers question about the usability of process discovery techniques in industry

LOGIC AND CONSTRAINT PROGRAMMING FOR COMPUTATIONAL SUSTAINABILITY

Computational Sustainability is an interdisciplinary field that aims to develop computational and mathematical models and methods for decision making concerning the management and allocation of resources in order to help solve environmental problems. This thesis deals with a broad spectrum of such problems (energy efficiency, water management, limiting greenhouse gas emissions and fuel consumption) giving a contribution towards their solution by means of Logic Programming (LP) and Constraint Programming (CP), declarative paradigms from Artificial Intelligence of proven solidity. The problems described in this thesis were proposed by experts of the respective domains and tested on the real data instances they provided. The results are encouraging and show the aptness of the chosen methodologies and approaches. The overall aim of this work is twofold: both to address real world problems in order to achieve practical results and to get, from the application of LP and CP technologies to complex scenarios, feedback and directions useful for their improvement

Incremental Declarative Process Mining

Business organizations achieve their mission by performing a number of processes. These span from simple sequences of actions to complex structured sets of activities with complex interrelation among them. The field of Business Processes Management studies how to describe, analyze, preserve and improve processes. In particular the subfield of Process Mining aims at inferring a model of the processes from logs (i.e. the collected records of performed activities). Moreover, processes can change over time to reflect mutated conditions, therefore it is often necessary to update the model. We call this activity Incremental Process Mining. To solve this problem, we modify the process mining system DPML to obtain IPM (Incremental Process Miner), which employs a subset of the SCIFF language to represent models and adopts techniques developed in Inductive Logic Programming to perform theory revision. The experimental results show that is more convenient to revise a theory rather than learning a new one from scratch

Incremental Declarative Process Mining with WoMan

Contemporary society is pervaded by complex processes. A company's success may depend on the proper definition, handling and management of its processes. Automated process management is fundamental to efficiently, effectively and economically carry out complex processes. In particular, emph{process discovery} is fundamental to automatically obtain process models from available executions of processes, because manually building these models is complex, costly and error-prone. Very important is incrementality in learning and adapting the models. This is not trivial, especially if the model includes multi-perspectiveness and guards. This paper describes the incremental process discovery strategy of the extsc{WoMan} framework for workflow management, based on First-Order Logic. It is emph{fully} and emph{inherently} incremental, it is more expressive than standard formalisms adopted in the literature, and ensures strict adherence to the observed practices. The incremental behavior of WoMan is also analyzed, reporting several experiments that show its effectiveness and efficiency