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

A General Framework for Predictive Business Process Monitoring

Abstract. As organizations gain awareness of the potential business value locked in their process execution event logs, "evidence-based" business process management (BPM) becomes a common tool for process analysts. In contrast to traditional process monitoring techniques which are typically performed using data from running process instances only, predictive evidence-based BPM methods tap also into historical data, to allow process workers to respond, in real-time, to specific process performance issues and compliance violations as they arise or even before they arise. In previous work, various approaches have been proposed to address typical predictive process monitoring problems, such as whether a running process instance will meet its performance targets, or when will an instance be finally finished. However, these approaches are rather ad-hoc and lack generality, as they tackle only particular, pre-defined aspects of predictive monitoring and often only work with specific characteristics of the dataset. The proposed research project aims at developing a general and robust framework for predictive process monitoring that will address a variety of process monitoring tasks such as predicting the outcome of individual activities or of the whole process instance, or predicting the completion path of an instance

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

Joint prediction of time series data in inventory management

Abstract(#br)The problem of time series prediction has been well explored in the community of data mining. However, little research attention has been paid to the case of predicting the movement of a collection of related time series data. In this work, we study the problem of simultaneously predicting multiple time series data using joint predictive models. We observe that in real-world applications, strong relationships between different time-sensitive variables are often held, either explicitly predefined or implicitly covered in nature of the application. Such relationships indicate that the prediction on the trajectory of one given time series could be improved by incorporating the properties of other related time series data into predictive models. The key challenge is to capture..

Combination usage of process mining and adaptive case management

Process mining performs well on structured processes like BPM. In recent years, Adaptive Case Management (ACM) was introduced to support knowledge workers by giving them the permission to define processes on the fly in unpredictable situations. By doing so, processes seem to be unstructured and hard to be enhanced. The goal of this thesis is to analyze how process mining can improve and benefit unstructured processes and to develop a prototype for a potential application. The scenario analysis focuses on (1) supporting knowledge workers with process mining, (2) transiting from unstructured to structured processes through process mining, and (3) compliance regulations in unstructured processes through process mining. One scenario is selected based on the analysis for implementing a prototype. Due to the importance of compliance regulations and rare researches on compliance regulations in unstructured processes, the scenario (3) is selected and an approach of compliance checking for unstructured processes using process mining is proposed. The prototype of the approach leverages process mining to discover hidden structured in unstructured processes and implements compliance checking functionalities consisting of graphical rule definition, rule creation and rule checking on a log in Oryx platform. The prototype visualizes violating paths on the process model and reports all violating process instances. The evaluation proves that the prototype is indeed capable of compliance checking with a large real-life data log

Äriprotsessi tulemuste ennustav ja korralduslik seire

Viimastel aastatel on erinevates valdkondades tegutsevad ettevõtted üles näidanud kasvavat huvi masinõppel põhinevate rakenduste kasutusele võtmiseks. Muuhulgas otsitakse võimalusi oma äriprotsesside efektiivsuse tõstmiseks, kasutades ennustusmudeleid protsesside jooksvaks seireks. Sellised ennustava protsessiseire meetodid võtavad sisendiks sündmuslogi, mis koosneb hulgast lõpetatud äriprotsessi juhtumite sündmusjadadest, ning kasutavad masinõppe algoritme ennustusmudelite treenimiseks. Saadud mudelid teevad ennustusi lõpetamata (antud ajahetkel aktiivsete) protsessijuhtumite jaoks, võttes sisendiks sündmuste jada, mis selle hetkeni on toimunud ning ennustades kas järgmist sündmust antud juhtumis, juhtumi lõppemiseni jäänud aega või instantsi lõpptulemust. Lõpptulemusele orienteeritud ennustava protsessiseire meetodid keskenduvad ennustamisele, kas protsessijuhtum lõppeb soovitud või ebasoovitava lõpptulemusega. Süsteemi kasutaja saab ennustuste alusel otsustada, kas sekkuda antud protsessijuhtumisse või mitte, eesmärgiga ära hoida ebasoovitavat lõpptulemust või leevendada selle negatiivseid tagajärgi. Erinevalt puhtalt ennustavatest süsteemidest annavad korralduslikud protsessiseire meetodid kasutajale ka soovitusi, kas ja kuidas antud juhtumisse sekkuda, eesmärgiga optimeerida mingit kindlat kasulikkusfunktsiooni. Käesolev doktoritöö uurib, kuidas treenida, hinnata ja kasutada ennustusmudeleid äriprotsesside lõpptulemuste ennustava ja korraldusliku seire raames. Doktoritöö pakub välja taksonoomia olemasolevate meetodite klassifitseerimiseks ja võrdleb neid katseliselt. Lisaks pakub töö välja raamistiku tekstiliste andmete kasutamiseks antud ennustusmudelites. Samuti pakume välja ennustuste ajalise stabiilsuse mõiste ning koostame raamistiku korralduslikuks protsessiseireks, mis annab kasutajatele soovitusi, kas protsessi sekkuda või mitte. Katsed näitavad, et väljapakutud lahendused täiendavad olemasolevaid meetodeid ning aitavad kaasa ennustava protsessiseire süsteemide rakendamisele reaalsetes süsteemides.Recent years have witnessed a growing adoption of machine learning techniques for business improvement across various fields. Among other emerging applications, organizations are exploiting opportunities to improve the performance of their business processes by using predictive models for runtime monitoring. Such predictive process monitoring techniques take an event log (a set of completed business process execution traces) as input and use machine learning techniques to train predictive models. At runtime, these techniques predict either the next event, the remaining time, or the final outcome of an ongoing case, given its incomplete execution trace consisting of the events performed up to the present moment in the given case. In particular, a family of techniques called outcome-oriented predictive process monitoring focuses on predicting whether a case will end with a desired or an undesired outcome. The user of the system can use the predictions to decide whether or not to intervene, with the purpose of preventing an undesired outcome or mitigating its negative effects. Prescriptive process monitoring systems go beyond purely predictive ones, by not only generating predictions but also advising the user if and how to intervene in a running case in order to optimize a given utility function. This thesis addresses the question of how to train, evaluate, and use predictive models for predictive and prescriptive monitoring of business process outcomes. The thesis proposes a taxonomy and performs a comparative experimental evaluation of existing techniques in the field. Moreover, we propose a framework for incorporating textual data to predictive monitoring systems. We introduce the notion of temporal stability to evaluate these systems and propose a prescriptive process monitoring framework for advising users if and how to act upon the predictions. The results suggest that the proposed solutions complement the existing techniques and can be useful for practitioners in implementing predictive process monitoring systems in real life

Process Mining to Forecast the Future of Running Cases

Processes are everywhere in our daily lives. More and more information about executions of processes are recorded in event logs by several information systems. Process mining techniques are used to analyze historic information hidden in event logs and to provide surprising insights for managers, system developers, auditors, and end users. While existing process mining techniques mainly analyze full process instances (cases), this paper extends the analysis to running cases, which have not yet completed. For running cases, process mining can be used to notify future events. This forecasting ability can provide insights for check conformance and support decision making. This paper details a process mining approach, which uses predictive clustering to equip an execution scenario with a prediction model. This model accounts for recent events of running cases to predict the characteristics of future events. Several tests with benchmark logs investigate the viability of the proposed approach