76 research outputs found
Unfolding-Based Process Discovery
This paper presents a novel technique for process discovery. In contrast to
the current trend, which only considers an event log for discovering a process
model, we assume two additional inputs: an independence relation on the set of
logged activities, and a collection of negative traces. After deriving an
intermediate net unfolding from them, we perform a controlled folding giving
rise to a Petri net which contains both the input log and all
independence-equivalent traces arising from it. Remarkably, the derived Petri
net cannot execute any trace from the negative collection. The entire chain of
transformations is fully automated. A tool has been developed and experimental
results are provided that witness the significance of the contribution of this
paper.Comment: This is the unabridged version of a paper with the same title
appearead at the proceedings of ATVA 201
The Need for Compliance Verification in Collaborative Business Processes
Compliance constrains processes to adhere to rules, standards, laws
and regulations. Non-compliance subjects enterprises to litigation and financial
fines. Collaborative business processes cross organizational and regional
borders implying that internal and cross regional regulations must be complied
with. To protect customs’ data, European enterprises must comply with the EU
data privacy regulation (general data protection regulation - GDPR) and each
member state’s data protection laws. An example of non-compliance with
GDPR is Facebook, it is accused for breaching subscriber trust. Compliance
verification is thus essential to deploy and implement collaborative business
process systems. It ensures that processes are checked for conformance to
compliance requirements throughout their life cycle. In this paper we take a
proactive approach aiming to discuss the need for design time preventative
compliance verification as opposed to after effect runtime detective approach.
We use a real-world case to show how compliance needs to be analyzed and
show the benefits of applying compliance check at the process design stag
Discovering duplicate tasks in transition systems for the simplification of process models
This work presents a set of methods to improve the understandability of process models. Traditionally, simplification methods trade off quality metrics, such as fitness or precision. Conversely, the methods proposed in this paper produce simplified models while preserving or even increasing fidelity metrics. The first problem addressed in the
paper is the discovery of duplicate tasks. A new method is proposed that avoids overfitting by working on the transition system generated by the log. The method is able to discover duplicate tasks even in the presence of concurrency and choice. The second problem is the structural simplification of the model by identifying optional and repetitive tasks. The tasks are substituted by annotated events that allow the removal of silent tasks and reduce the complexity of the
model. An important feature of the methods proposed in this paper is that they are independent from the actual miner used for process discovery.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
The Need for Compliance Verification in Collaborative Business Processes
Compliance constrains processes to adhere to rules, standards, laws
and regulations. Non-compliance subjects enterprises to litigation and financial
fines. Collaborative business processes cross organizational and regional
borders implying that internal and cross regional regulations must be complied
with. To protect customs’ data, European enterprises must comply with the EU
data privacy regulation (general data protection regulation - GDPR) and each
member state’s data protection laws. An example of non-compliance with
GDPR is Facebook, it is accused for breaching subscriber trust. Compliance
verification is thus essential to deploy and implement collaborative business
process systems. It ensures that processes are checked for conformance to
compliance requirements throughout their life cycle. In this paper we take a
proactive approach aiming to discuss the need for design time preventative
compliance verification as opposed to after effect runtime detective approach.
We use a real-world case to show how compliance needs to be analyzed and
show the benefits of applying compliance check at the process design stag
Definition and Validation of Process Mining Use Cases
Process mining is an emerging topic in the BPM marketplace. Recently, several (commercial) software solutions have become available. Due to the lack of an evaluation framework, it is very difficult for potential users to assess the strengths and weaknesses of these process mining tools. As the first step towards such an evaluation framework, we developed a set of process mining use cases and validated these use cases by means of expert interviews and a survey. We present the list of use cases and discuss the insights from our empirical validation. These use cases will then form the basis for a detailed evaluation of current process mining tools on the market
Conformance checking using activity and trace embeddings
Conformance checking describes process mining techniques used to compare an event log and a corresponding process model. In this paper, we propose an entirely new approach to conformance checking based on neural network-based embeddings. These embeddings are vector representations of every activity/task present in the model and log, obtained via act2vec, a Word2vec based model. Our novel conformance checking approach applies the Word Mover’s Distance to the activity embeddings of traces in order to measure fitness and precision. In addition, we investigate a more efficiently calculated lower bound of the former metric, i.e. the Iterative Constrained Transfers measure. An alternative method using trace2vec, a Doc2vec based model, to train and compare vector representations of the process instances themselves is also introduced. These methods are tested in different settings and compared to other conformance checking techniques, showing promising results
Finding suitable activity clusters for decomposed process discovery
Event data can be found in any information system and provide the starting point for a range of process mining techniques. The widespread availability of large amounts of event data also creates new challenges. Existing process mining techniques are often unable to handle "big event data" adequately. Decomposed process mining aims to solve this problem by decomposing the process mining problem into many smaller problems which can be solved in less time, using less resources, or even in parallel. Many decomposed process mining techniques have been proposed in literature. Analysis shows that even though the decomposition step takes a relatively small amount of time, it is of key importance in finding a high-quality process model and for the computation time required to discover the individual parts. Currently there is no way to assess the quality of a decomposition beforehand. We define three quality notions that can be used to assess a decomposition, before using it to discover a model or check conformance with. We then propose a decomposition approach that uses these notions and is able to find a high-quality decomposition in little time. Keywords: decomposed process mining, decomposed process discovery, distributed computing, event lo
Towards Compliance of Cross-Organizational Processes and their Changes
Businesses require the ability to rapidly implement new processes and to quickly adapt existing ones to environmental changes including the optimization of their interactions with partners and customers. However, changes of either intra- or cross-organizational processes must not be done in an uncontrolled manner. In particular, processes
are increasingly subject to compliance rules that usually stem from security constraints, corporate guidelines, standards, and laws. These compliance rules have to be considered when modeling business processes and changing existing ones. While change and compliance have been extensively discussed for intra-organizational business processes, albeit only in an isolated manner, their combination in the context of cross-organizational processes remains an open issue. In this paper, we discuss requirements and challenges to be tackled in order to ensure that changes of cross-organizational business processes preserve compliance with imposed regulations, standards and laws
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