More and more business activities are performed using information systems.
These systems produce such huge amounts of event data that existing systems are
unable to store and process them. Moreover, few processes are in steady-state
and due to changing circumstances processes evolve and systems need to adapt
continuously. Since conventional process discovery algorithms have been defined
for batch processing, it is difficult to apply them in such evolving
environments. Existing algorithms cannot cope with streaming event data and
tend to generate unreliable and obsolete results.
In this paper, we discuss the peculiarities of dealing with streaming event
data in the context of process mining. Subsequently, we present a general
framework for defining process mining algorithms in settings where it is
impossible to store all events over an extended period or where processes
evolve while being analyzed. We show how the Heuristics Miner, one of the most
effective process discovery algorithms for practical applications, can be
modified using this framework. Different stream-aware versions of the
Heuristics Miner are defined and implemented in ProM. Moreover, experimental
results on artificial and real logs are reported
