Conformance testing : measuring the alignment between event logs and process models

Many companies have adopted Process Aware Information Systems (PAIS) for supporting their business processes in some form. On the one hand these systems typically log events (e.g., in transaction logs or audit trails) related to the actual business process executions. On the other hand explicit process models describing how the business process should (or is expected to) be executed are frequently available. Together with the data recorded in the log, this raises the interesting question "Do the model and the log conform to each other?". Conformance testing, also referred to as conformance analysis, aims at the detection of inconsistencies between a process model and its corresponding execution log, and their quantification by the formation of metrics. This paper proposes an incremental approach to check the conformance of a process model and an event log. At first, the fitness between the log and the model is ensured (i.e., "Does the observed process comply with the control flow specified by the process model?"). At second, the appropriateness of the model can be analyzed with respect to the log (i.e., "Does the model describe the observed process in a suitable way?"). Furthermore, this suitability must be evaluated from both a structural and a behavioral perspective. To verify the presented ideas a Conformance Checker has been implemented within the ProM framewor

Il workflow per il reengineering e l’automazione dei processi aziendali: il modello teorico e la sua applicazione per la realizzazione del processo di gestione delle trasferte del personale in Piaggio

La presente tesi tratta una classe di applicazioni software la cui importanza per l'automazione dei processi aziendali sta crescendo sempre di più. I sistemi per la gestione del workflow stanno infatti diffondendosi nelle organizzazioni per gestire in modo efficiente ed automatico processi produttivi o amministrativi basati sul passaggio di informazioni o documenti tra vari attori. Il presente documento descrive dunque sia il workflow nella sua componente teorica, sia le caratteristiche comuni agli strumenti informatici che si occupano della sua gestione (con particolare attenzione a quelli di ultima generazione, basati sulle tecnologie Web per la realizzazione dell'integrazione interaziendale), sia un'applicazione pratica dei concetti esposti nella realizzazione concreta del processo di gestione delle trasferte del personale sviluppato, grazie ad uno strumento di workflow, per la ditta Piaggio S.p.A

Process mining : conformance and extension

Today’s business processes are realized by a complex sequence of tasks that are performed throughout an organization, often involving people from different departments and multiple IT systems. For example, an insurance company has a process to handle insurance claims for their clients, and a hospital has processes to diagnose and treat patients. Because there are many activities performed by different people throughout the organization, there is a lack of transparency about how exactly these processes are executed. However, understanding the process reality (the "as is" process) is the first necessary step to save cost, increase quality, or ensure compliance. The field of process mining aims to assist in creating process transparency by automatically analyzing processes based on existing IT data. Most processes are supported by IT systems nowadays. For example, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems such as SAP log all transaction information, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are used to keep track of all interactions with customers. Process mining techniques use these low-level log data (so-called event logs) to automatically generate process maps that visualize the process reality from different perspectives. For example, it is possible to automatically create process models that describe the causal dependencies between activities in the process. So far, process mining research has mostly focused on the discovery aspect (i.e., the extraction of models from event logs). This dissertation broadens the field of process mining to include the aspect of conformance and extension. Conformance aims at the detection of deviations from documented procedures by comparing the real process (as recorded in the event log) with an existing model that describes the assumed or intended process. Conformance is relevant for two reasons: 1. Most organizations document their processes in some form. For example, process models are created manually to understand and improve the process, comply with regulations, or for certification purposes. In the presence of existing models, it is often more important to point out the deviations from these existing models than to discover completely new models. Discrepancies emerge because business processes change, or because the models did not accurately reflect the real process in the first place (due to the manual and subjective creation of these models). If the existing models do not correspond to the actual processes, then they have little value. 2. Automatically discovered process models typically do not completely "fit" the event logs from which they were created. These discrepancies are due to noise and/or limitations of the used discovery techniques. Furthermore, in the context of complex and diverse process environments the discovered models often need to be simplified to obtain useful insights. Therefore, it is crucial to be able to check how much a discovered process model actually represents the real process. Conformance techniques can be used to quantify the representativeness of a mined model before drawing further conclusions. They thus constitute an important quality measurement to effectively use process discovery techniques in a practical setting. Once one is confident in the quality of an existing or discovered model, extension aims at the enrichment of these models by the integration of additional characteristics such as time, cost, or resource utilization. By extracting aditional information from an event log and projecting it onto an existing model, bottlenecks can be highlighted and correlations with other process perspectives can be identified. Such an integrated view on the process is needed to understand root causes for potential problems and actually make process improvements. Furthermore, extension techniques can be used to create integrated simulation models from event logs that resemble the real process more closely than manually created simulation models. In Part II of this thesis, we provide a comprehensive framework for the conformance checking of process models. First, we identify the evaluation dimensions fitness, decision/generalization, and structure as the relevant conformance dimensions.We develop several Petri-net based approaches to measure conformance in these dimensions and describe five case studies in which we successfully applied these conformance checking techniques to real and artificial examples. Furthermore, we provide a detailed literature review of related conformance measurement approaches (Chapter 4). Then, we study existing model evaluation approaches from the field of data mining. We develop three data mining-inspired evaluation approaches for discovered process models, one based on Cross Validation (CV), one based on the Minimal Description Length (MDL) principle, and one using methods based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). We conclude that process model evaluation faces similar yet different challenges compared to traditional data mining. Additional challenges emerge from the sequential nature of the data and the higher-level process models, which include concurrent dynamic behavior (Chapter 5). Finally, we point out current shortcomings and identify general challenges for conformance checking techniques. These challenges relate to the applicability of the conformance metric, the metric quality, and the bridging of different process modeling languages. We develop a flexible, language-independent conformance checking approach that provides a starting point to effectively address these challenges (Chapter 6). In Part III, we develop a concrete extension approach, provide a general model for process extensions, and apply our approach for the creation of simulation models. First, we develop a Petri-net based decision mining approach that aims at the discovery of decision rules at process choice points based on data attributes in the event log. While we leverage classification techniques from the data mining domain to actually infer the rules, we identify the challenges that relate to the initial formulation of the learning problem from a process perspective. We develop a simple approach to partially overcome these challenges, and we apply it in a case study (Chapter 7). Then, we develop a general model for process extensions to create integrated models including process, data, time, and resource perspective.We develop a concrete representation based on Coloured Petri-nets (CPNs) to implement and deploy this model for simulation purposes (Chapter 8). Finally, we evaluate the quality of automatically discovered simulation models in two case studies and extend our approach to allow for operational decision making by incorporating the current process state as a non-empty starting point in the simulation (Chapter 9). Chapter 10 concludes this thesis with a detailed summary of the contributions and a list of limitations and future challenges. The work presented in this dissertation is supported and accompanied by concrete implementations, which have been integrated in the ProM and ProMimport frameworks. Appendix A provides a comprehensive overview about the functionality of the developed software. The results presented in this dissertation have been presented in more than twenty peer-reviewed scientific publications, including several high-quality journals

Gestión de Editoriales Universitarias en Panamá

La editorial universitaria está definida como una organización que actúa o funciona dentro del ámbito universitario, cuya actividad principal es la de orientar, buscar, obtener, evaluar y seleccionar, para su publicación y posterior difusión, obras académicas y literarias válidas, de calidad y/o rigor científico. A nivel académico, se trata de gestión del conocimiento desde el ámbito de la comunicación escrita con respecto a la producción, diseminación y uso en todos sus formatos, ya no circunscrito al libro como marco restrictivo, por cuanto las tipologías documentales son apenas elementos particulares y delimitados, y se trata de rescatar la esencia propia de su ámbito de aplicación. En el caso de las editoriales universitarias panameñas, este libro apunta a identificar un modelo de gestión competitivo, cónsono con la misión de las universidades en la difusión de conocimiento, donde el desafío de las editoriales es llevar el conocimiento a la sociedad para que esta se enriquezca. Se pretende realizar una revisión de las actividades y estrategias implementadas por algunas de las editoriales de las universidades de América Latina y el Caribe, y hacer una comparación con las estrategias que han sido utilizadas por las editoriales de universidades panameñas para sentar las bases de transferencia estratégica de conocimiento en el área y aumentar la producción editorial. A esto, se quiere agregar como variable el cumplimiento de esa gestión con los objetivos y políticas de las universidades y, particularmente, con la transferencia de conocimiento a la sociedad, lo que enfoca llevar a presentar un modelo de gestión que permita coadyuvar esfuerzos al fortalecimiento de las editoriales universitarias en el país.La editorial universitaria está definida como una organización que actúa o funciona dentro del ámbito universitario, cuya actividad principal es la de orientar, buscar, obtener, evaluar y seleccionar, para su publicación y posterior difusión, obras académicas y literarias válidas, de calidad y/o rigor científico. A nivel académico, se trata de gestión del conocimiento desde el ámbito de la comunicación escrita con respecto a la producción, diseminación y uso en todos sus formatos, ya no circunscrito al libro como marco restrictivo, por cuanto las tipologías documentales son apenas elementos particulares y delimitados, y se trata de rescatar la esencia propia de su ámbito de aplicación. En el caso de las editoriales universitarias panameñas, este libro apunta a identificar un modelo de gestión competitivo, cónsono con la misión de las universidades en la difusión de conocimiento, donde el desafío de las editoriales es llevar el conocimiento a la sociedad para que esta se enriquezca. Se pretende realizar una revisión de las actividades y estrategias implementadas por algunas de las editoriales de las universidades de América Latina y el Caribe, y hacer una comparación con las estrategias que han sido utilizadas por las editoriales de universidades panameñas para sentar las bases de transferencia estratégica de conocimiento en el área y aumentar la producción editorial. A esto, se quiere agregar como variable el cumplimiento de esa gestión con los objetivos y políticas de las universidades y, particularmente, con la transferencia de conocimiento a la sociedad, lo que enfoca llevar a presentar un modelo de gestión que permita coadyuvar esfuerzos al fortalecimiento de las editoriales universitarias en el país

Workflow-based Process Monitoring and Controlling - Technical and Organizational Issues

Workflow management systems enable the exact and timely analysis of automated business processes through the analysis of the logged audit trail data. Within the research project CONGO 1 we develop a process analysis tool (PISA) that can be employed to analyze the audit trail data of different workflow management systems in conjunction with target data from business process modeling tools. A working prototype has been completed that integrates data of the ARIS Toolset and IBM MQSeries Workflow. The analysis focuses on three different perspectives – processes and functions, involved resources, and process objects. We outline the economic aspects of workflow-based process monitoring and controlling and the current state of the art in monitoring facilities provided by current workflow management systems and existing standards. After a discussion of the three evaluation perspectives, sample evaluation methods for each perspective are discussed. The concept and architecture of PISA are described and implementation issues are outlined before an outlook on further research is given. 1. Distributed process information systems 1.1. Workflow monitoring and controlling The need to serve customers in global markets and the tendency towards smaller, more flexible, less hierarchical organizations leads to an increasing spatial distribution of companies. This distribution of formerly centralized enterprises on the one side and the (temporary) integratio

An investigation into the relevance of flexibility- and interoperability requirements for implementation processes for workflow-management-applications

Flexibility and Interoperability have become important characteristics for organisations and their business processes. The need to control flexible business processes within an organisation’s boundaries and between organisations imposes major requirements on a company’s process control capabilities. Workflow Management Systems (WFMS) try to fulfil these requirements by offering respective product features. Evidence suggests that the achievement of flexible business processes and an inter-organisational process control is also influenced by implementation processes for Workflow Management Applications (WFMA). [A WFMA comprises the WFMS and "all WFMS specific data with regard to one or more business processes" [VER01]]. The impact of a WFMA implementation methodology on the fulfilment of these requirements is the research scope of the project. The thesis provides knowledge in the following areas: 1. Review of the relationship between workflow management and the claim for process flexibility respectively -interoperability. 2. Definition of a research-/evaluation framework for workflow projects. This framework is composed of all relevant research variables that have been identified for the thesis. 3. Empirical survey of relevant workflow-project objectives and their priority in the context of process flexibility and –interoperability. 4. Empirical survey of the objectives’ achievement. 5. Empirical survey of methodologies / activities that have been applied within workflow projects. 6. Derivation of the project methodologies’ effectiveness in terms of the impact that applied activities had on project objectives. 7. Evaluation of existing workflow life-cycle models in accordance with the research framework. 8. Identification of basic improvements for workflow implementation processes with respect to the achievement of flexible and interoperable business processes. The first part of the thesis argues the relevance of the subject. Afterwards research variables that constitute the evaluation framework for WFMA implementation processes are stepwise identified and defined. An empirical study then proves the variables’ effectiveness for the achievement of process flexibility and –interoperability within the WFMA implementation process. After this the framework is applied to evaluate chosen WFMA implementation methodologies. Identified weaknesses and effective methodological aspects are utilised to develop generic methodological improvements. These improvements are later validated by means of a case study and interviews with workflow experts.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo