Predictive Monitoring of Business Processes

Modern information systems that support complex business processes generally maintain significant amounts of process execution data, particularly records of events corresponding to the execution of activities (event logs). In this paper, we present an approach to analyze such event logs in order to predictively monitor business goals during business process execution. At any point during an execution of a process, the user can define business goals in the form of linear temporal logic rules. When an activity is being executed, the framework identifies input data values that are more (or less) likely to lead to the achievement of each business goal. Unlike reactive compliance monitoring approaches that detect violations only after they have occurred, our predictive monitoring approach provides early advice so that users can steer ongoing process executions towards the achievement of business goals. In other words, violations are predicted (and potentially prevented) rather than merely detected. The approach has been implemented in the ProM process mining toolset and validated on a real-life log pertaining to the treatment of cancer patients in a large hospital

A Literature Review on Predictive Monitoring of Business Processes

Oleme läbi vaadanud mitmesuguseid ennetava jälgimise meetodeid äriprotsessides. Prognoositavate seirete eesmärk on aidata ettevõtetel oma eesmärke saavutada, aidata neil valida õige ärimudel, prognoosida tulemusi ja aega ning muuta äriprotsessid riskantsemaks. Antud väitekirjaga oleme hoolikalt kogunud ja üksikasjalikult läbi vaadanud selle väitekirja teemal oleva kirjanduse. Kirjandusuuringu tulemustest ja tähelepanekutest lähtuvalt oleme hoolikalt kavandanud ennetava jälgimisraamistiku. Raamistik on juhendiks ettevõtetele ja teadlastele, teadustöötajatele, kes uurivad selles valdkonnas ja ettevõtetele, kes soovivad neid tehnikaid oma valdkonnas rakendada.The goal of predictive monitoring is to help the business achieve their goals, help them take the right business path, predict outcomes, estimate delivery time, and make business processes risk aware. In this thesis, we have carefully collected and reviewed in detail all literature which falls in this process mining category. The objective of the thesis is to design a Predictive Monitoring Framework and classify the different predictive monitoring techniques. The framework acts as a guide for researchers and businesses. Researchers who are investigating in this field and businesses who want to apply these techniques in their respective field

Run-time prediction of business process indicators using evolutionary decision rules

Predictive monitoring of business processes is a challenging topic of process mining which is concerned with the prediction of process indicators of running process instances. The main value of predictive monitoring is to provide information in order to take proactive and corrective actions to improve process performance and mitigate risks in real time. In this paper, we present an approach for predictive monitoring based on the use of evolutionary algorithms. Our method provides a novel event window-based encoding and generates a set of decision rules for the run-time prediction of process indicators according to event log properties. These rules can be interpreted by users to extract further insight of the business processes while keeping a high level of accuracy. Furthermore, a full software stack consisting of a tool to support the training phase and a framework that enables the integration of run-time predictions with business process management systems, has been developed. Obtained results show the validity of our proposal for two large real-life datasets: BPI Challenge 2013 and IT Department of Andalusian Health Service (SAS).Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-70560-RJunta de Andalucía P12TIC-186

What Automated Planning Can Do for Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) is a central element of today organizations. Despite over the years its main focus has been the support of processes in highly controlled domains, nowadays many domains of interest to the BPM community are characterized by ever-changing requirements, unpredictable environments and increasing amounts of data that influence the execution of process instances. Under such dynamic conditions, BPM systems must increase their level of automation to provide the reactivity and flexibility necessary for process management. On the other hand, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community has concentrated its efforts on investigating dynamic domains that involve active control of computational entities and physical devices (e.g., robots, software agents, etc.). In this context, Automated Planning, which is one of the oldest areas in AI, is conceived as a model-based approach to synthesize autonomous behaviours in automated way from a model. In this paper, we discuss how automated planning techniques can be leveraged to enable new levels of automation and support for business processing, and we show some concrete examples of their successful application to the different stages of the BPM life cycle

Context-Aware Process Performance Indicator Prediction

It is well-known that context impacts running instances of a process. Thus, defining and using contextual information may help to improve the predictive monitoring of business processes, which is one of the main challenges in process mining. However, identifying this contextual information is not an easy task because it might change depending on the target of the prediction. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology named CAP3 (Context-aware Process Performance indicator Prediction) which involves two phases. The first phase guides process analysts on identifying the context for the predictive monitoring of process performance indicators (PPIs), which are quantifiable metrics focused on measuring the progress of strategic objectives aimed to improve the process. The second phase involves a context-aware predictive monitoring technique that incorporates the relevant context information as input for the prediction. Our methodology leverages context-oriented domain knowledge and experts’ feedback to discover the contextual information useful to improve the quality of PPI prediction with a decrease of error rates in most cases, by adding this information as features to the datasets used as input of the predictive monitoring process. We experimentally evaluated our approach using two-real-life organizations. Process experts from both organizations applied CAP3 methodology and identified the contextual information to be used for prediction. The model learned using this information achieved lower error rates in most cases than the model learned without contextual information confirming the benefits of CAP3.European Union Horizon 2020 No. 645751 (RISE BPM)Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades Horatio RTI2018-101204-B-C21Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades OPHELIA RTI2018-101204-B-C2

Handling Concept Drift for Predictions in Business Process Mining

Predictive services nowadays play an important role across all business sectors. However, deployed machine learning models are challenged by changing data streams over time which is described as concept drift. Prediction quality of models can be largely influenced by this phenomenon. Therefore, concept drift is usually handled by retraining of the model. However, current research lacks a recommendation which data should be selected for the retraining of the machine learning model. Therefore, we systematically analyze different data selection strategies in this work. Subsequently, we instantiate our findings on a use case in process mining which is strongly affected by concept drift. We can show that we can improve accuracy from 0.5400 to 0.7010 with concept drift handling. Furthermore, we depict the effects of the different data selection strategies

LSTM Networks for Data-Aware Remaining Time Prediction of Business Process Instances

Predicting the completion time of business process instances would be a very helpful aid when managing processes under service level agreement constraints. The ability to know in advance the trend of running process instances would allow business managers to react in time, in order to prevent delays or undesirable situations. However, making such accurate forecasts is not easy: many factors may influence the required time to complete a process instance. In this paper, we propose an approach based on deep Recurrent Neural Networks (specifically LSTMs) that is able to exploit arbitrary information associated to single events, in order to produce an as-accurate-as-possible prediction of the completion time of running instances. Experiments on real-world datasets confirm the quality of our proposal.Comment: Article accepted for publication in 2017 IEEE Symposium on Deep Learning (IEEE DL'17) @ SSC

Incremental Predictive Process Monitoring: How to Deal with the Variability of Real Environments

A characteristic of existing predictive process monitoring techniques is to first construct a predictive model based on past process executions, and then use it to predict the future of new ongoing cases, without the possibility of updating it with new cases when they complete their execution. This can make predictive process monitoring too rigid to deal with the variability of processes working in real environments that continuously evolve and/or exhibit new variant behaviors over time. As a solution to this problem, we propose the use of algorithms that allow the incremental construction of the predictive model. These incremental learning algorithms update the model whenever new cases become available so that the predictive model evolves over time to fit the current circumstances. The algorithms have been implemented using different case encoding strategies and evaluated on a number of real and synthetic datasets. The results provide a first evidence of the potential of incremental learning strategies for predicting process monitoring in real environments, and of the impact of different case encoding strategies in this setting