Case and Activity Identification for Mining Process Models from Middleware

Process monitoring aims to provide transparency over operational aspects of a business process. In practice, it is a challenge that traces of business process executions span across a number of diverse systems. It is cumbersome manual engineering work to identify which attributes in unstructured event data can serve as case and activity identifiers for extracting and monitoring the business process. Approaches from literature assume that these identifiers are known a priori and data is readily available in formats like eXtensible Event Stream (XES). However, in practice this is hardly the case, specifically when event data from different sources are pooled together in event stores. In this paper, we address this research gap by inferring potential case and activity identifiers in a provenance agnostic way. More specifically, we propose a semi-automatic technique for discovering event relations that are semantically relevant for business process monitoring. The results are evaluated in an industry case study with an international telecommunication provider

Event log reconstruction using autoencoders

Poor quality of process event logs prevents high quality business process analysis and improvement. Process event logs quality decreases because of missing attribute values or after incorrect or irrelevant attribute values are identified and removed. Reconstructing a correct value for these missing attributes is likely to increase the quality of event log-based process analyses. Traditional statistical reconstruction methods work poorly with event logs, because of the complex interrelations among attributes, events and cases. Machine learning approaches appear more suitable in this context, since they can learn complex models of event logs through training. This paper proposes a method for reconstructing missing attribute values in event logs based on the use of autoencoders. Autoencoders are a class of feed-forward neural networks that reconstruct their own input after having learnt a model of its latent distribution. They suit problems of unsupervised learning, such as the one considered in this paper. When reconstructing missing attribute values in an event log, in fact, one cannot assume that a training set with true labels is available for model training. The proposed method is evaluated on two real event logs against baseline methods commonly used in the literature for imputing missing values in large datasets

Bot log mining: Using logs from robotic process automation for process mining

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is an emerging technology for automating tasks using bots that can mimic human actions on computer systems. Most existing research focuses on the earlier phases of RPA implementations, e.g. the discovery of tasks that are suitable for automation. To detect exceptions and explore opportunities for bot and process redesign, historical data from RPA-enabled processes in the form of bot logs or process logs can be utilized. However, the isolated use of bot logs or process logs provides only limited insights and not a good understanding of an overall process. Therefore, we develop an approach that merges bot logs with process logs for process mining. A merged log enables an integrated view on the role and effects of bots in an RPA-enabled process. We first develop an integrated data model describing the structure and relation of bots and business processes. We then specify and instantiate a ‘bot log parser’ translating bot logs of three leading RPA vendors into the XES format. Further, we develop the ‘log merger’ functionality that merges bot logs with logs of the underlying business processes. We further introduce process mining measures allowing the analysis of a merged lo

A probabilistic approach to event-case correlation for process mining

Process mining aims to understand the actual behavior and performance of business processes from event logs recorded by IT systems. A key requirement is that every event in the log must be associated with a unique case identifier (e.g., the order ID in an order-to-cash process). In reality, however, this case ID may not always be present, especially when logs are acquired from different systems or when such systems have not been explicitly designed to offer process-tracking capabilities. Existing techniques for correlating events have worked with assumptions to make the problem tractable: some assume the generative processes to be acyclic while others require heuristic information or user input. In this paper, we lift these assumptions by presenting a novel technique called EC-SA based on probabilistic optimization. Given as input a sequence of timestamped events (the log without case IDs) and a process model describing the underlying business process, our approach returns an event log in which every event is mapped to a case identifier. The approach minimises the misalignment between the generated log and the input process model, and the variance between activity durations across cases. The experiments conducted on a variety of real-life datasets show the advantages of our approach over the state of the art