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In a competitive environment, organizations need to continuously understand, analyze and improve the behavior of processes to maintain their position in the market. Process mining is a set of techniques that allows organizations to have an X-ray view of their processes by extracting process related knowledge from the information recorded in today's process aware information systems such as 'Enterprise Resource Planning' systems, 'Business Process Management' systems, 'Supply Chain Management' systems, etc. One of the major categories of process mining techniques is the process of discovery. This later allows for automatically constructing process models just from the information stored in the system representing the real behavior of the process discovered. Many process discovery algorithms have been proposed today which made users and businesses, in front of many techniques, unable to choose or decide the appropriate mining algorithm for their business processes. Moreover, existing evaluation and recommendation frameworks have several important drawbacks. This paper proposes a new framework for recommending the most suitable process discovery technique to a given process taking into consideration the limitations of existing frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional approaches for process modeling and process analysis tend to focus on one type of object (also referred to as cases or instances), and each event refers to precisely one such object. This simplifies modeling and analysis, e.g., a process model merely describes the lifecycle of one object (e.g., a production order or an insurance claim) in terms of its activities (i.e., event types). However, in reality, there are often multiple objects of different types involved in an event. Think about filling out an electronic form referring to one order, one customer, ten items, three shipments, and one invoice. Object-centric process mining (OCPM) takes a more holistic and more comprehensive approach to process analysis and improvement by considering multiple object types and events that involve any number of objects. This paper introduces object-centric event data (OCED) and shows how these can be used to discover, analyze, and improve the fabric of real-life, highly intertwined processes. This tutorial-style paper presents the basic concepts, object-centric process-mining techniques, examples, and formalizes OCED. Fully embracing object centricity provides organizations with a "three-dimensional" view of their processes, showing how they interact with each other, and where the root causes of performance and compliance problems lie. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for the analysis of modern businesses is rapidly increasing as the supporting enterprise systems generate more and more data. This data can be extremely valuable for executing organizations because the data allows constant monitoring, analyzing, and improving the underlying processes, which leads to the reduction of cost and the improvement of the quality. Process mining is a useful technique for analyzing enterprise systems by using an event log that contains behaviours. This research focuses on the process discovery and refinement using real-life event log data collected from a large multinational organization that deals with coatings and paints. By investigating and analyzing their order handling processes, this study aims at learning a model that gives insight inspection of the processes and performance analysis. Furthermore, the animation is also performed for the better inspection, diagnostics, and compliance-related questions to specify the system. The configuration of the system and the conformance checking for further enhancement is also addressed in this research. To achieve the objectives, this research uses process mining techniques, i.e. process discovery in the form of formal Petri nets models with the help of process maps, and process refinement through conformance checking and enhancement. Initially, the identified executed process is reconstructed by using the process discovery techniques. Following the reconstruction, we perform a deep analysis for the underlying process to ensure the process improvement and redesigning. Finally, some recommendations are made to improve the enterprise management system processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Process mining tools can help discover and improve the business processes of urban community services from historical service event records. However, for the community service domains with small datasets, the effects of process mining are generally limited due to process incompleteness and data noise. In this paper, a cross-domain knowledge transfer method is proposed to help service process discovery with small datasets by making use of rich knowledge in similar domains with large datasets. Design/methodology/approach: First, ontology modeling is used to reduce the effects of cross-domain semantic ambiguity on knowledge transfer. Second, association rules (of the activities in the service processes) are extracted with Bayesian network. Third, applicable association rules are retrieved using an applicability assignment function. Further, the retrieved association rules in domains with large datasets are mapped to those with a small dataset using a linear programming method, with a heuristic miner being adopted to generate the process model. Findings: The proposed method is verified based on the empirical data of 10 service domains from Beidaihe, China. Results show that process discovery performance of all 10 domains were improved with the overall robustness score, precision, recall and F1 score increased by 13%, 13%, 17% and 15%, respectively. For the domains with only small datasets, the cross-domain knowledge transfer method outperforms popular state-of-the art methods. Originality/value: The limitations of sample sizes are greatly reduced. This scheme can be followed to establish business process management systems of community services with reasonable performance and limited sample sizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional approaches for process modeling and process analysis tend to focus on one type of object (also referred to as cases or instances), and each event refers to precisely one such object. This simplifies modeling and analysis, e.g., a process model merely describes the lifecycle of one object (e.g., a production order or an insurance claim) in terms of its activities (i.e., event types). However, in reality, there are often multiple objects of different types involved in an event. Think about filling out an electronic form referring to one order, one customer, ten items, three shipments, and one invoice. Object-centric process mining (OCPM) takes a more holistic and more comprehensive approach to process analysis and improvement by considering multiple object types and events that involve any number of objects. This paper introduces object-centric event data (OCED) and shows how these can be used to discover, analyze, and improve the fabric of real-life, highly intertwined processes. This tutorial-style paper presents the basic concepts, object-centric process-mining techniques, examples, and formalizes OCED. Fully embracing object centricity provides organizations with a “three-dimensional” view of their processes, showing how they interact with each other, and where the root causes of performance and compliance problems lie.

Data centres have become the backbone of large Cloud services and applications, providing virtually unlimited elastic and scalable computational and storage resources. The search for the efficiency and optimisation of resources is one of the current key aspects for large Cloud Service Providers and is becoming more and more challenging, since new computing paradigms such as Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems and Edge Computing are spreading. One of the key aspects to achieve efficiency in data centres consists of the discovery and proper analysis of the data-centre behaviour. In this paper, we present a model to automatically retrieve execution workflows of existing data-centre logs by employing process mining techniques. The discovered processes are characterised and analysed according to the understandability and complexity in terms of execution efficiency of data-centre jobs. We finally validate and demonstrate the usability of the proposal by applying the model in a real scenario, that is, the Google Cluster traces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, Business processes in organizations are supported by information systems. These systems record organizational processes outputs in the form of event logs, which contain valuable information about processes and their performance. Process mining extract knowledge from event logs. One of the most important tasks in process mining is process model discovery that uses an algorithm to build a process model from a given event log. In this research, a new model which named ICMA proposed for discovering process models. This model has three steps, pre-processing phase, body of model and post-processing phase. Imperialist Competitive Algorithm (ICA) was used for the first time as body of proposed model. Nine hundred nineteen event logs were used, those are balanced event logs, unbalanced event logs, and real-life event logs. Moreover, those event logs were studied at the 0%, 1%, 5%, 10% and 20% noise levels and the results have compared to the recent Vazquise algorithm. The research findings revealed that precision and completeness of our model is better than Vazquez model. In this paper has been shown that the ICMA model compared to the other approaches in literature method drastically improved the precision and completeness of the model. In addition, the noise problem was satisfactorily solved through data pre-processing and post-processing operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Event data are collected in logistics, manufacturing, finance, health care, customer relationship management, e‐learning, e‐government, and many other domains. The events found in these domains typically refer to activities executed by resources at particular times and for a particular case (i.e., process instances). Process mining techniques are able to exploit such data. In this article, we focus on process discovery. However, process mining also includes conformance checking, performance analysis, decision mining, organizational mining, predictions, recommendations, and so on. These techniques help to diagnose problems and improve processes. All process mining techniques involve both event data and process models. Therefore, a typical first step is to automatically learn a control‐flow model from the event data. This is very challenging, but in recent years, many powerful discovery techniques have been developed. It is not easy to compare these techniques since they use different representations and make different assumptions. Users often need to resort to trying different algorithms in an ad‐hoc manner. Developers of new techniques are often trying to solve specific instances of a more general problem. Therefore, we aim to unify existing approaches by focusing on log and model abstractions. These abstractions link observed and modeled behavior: Concrete behaviors recorded in event logs are related to possible behaviors represented by process models. Hence, such behavioral abstractions provide an “interface” between both of them. We discuss four discovery approaches involving three abstractions and different types of process models (Petri nets, block‐structured models, and declarative models). The goal is to provide a comprehensive understanding of process discovery and show how to develop new techniques. Examples illustrate the different approaches and pointers to software are given. The discussion on abstractions and process representations is also presented to reflect on the gap between process mining literature and commercial process mining tools. This facilitates users to select an appropriate process discovery technique. Moreover, structuring the role of internal abstractions and representations helps broaden the view and facilitates the creation of new discovery approaches. This article is categorized under: Algorithmic Development > Spatial and Temporal Data Mining Application Areas > Business and Industry Technologies > Machine Learning Application Areas > Data Mining Software Tools [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of process discovery, originating from the area of process mining, is to discover a process model based on business process execution data. A majority of process discovery techniques relies on an event log as an input. An event log is a static source of historical data capturing the execution of a business process. In this paper, we focus on process discovery relying on online streams of business process execution events. Learning process models from event streams poses both challenges and opportunities, i.e. we need to handle unlimited amounts of data using finite memory and, preferably, constant time. We propose a generic architecture that allows for adopting several classes of existing process discovery techniques in context of event streams. Moreover, we provide several instantiations of the architecture, accompanied by implementations in the process mining toolkit ProM (). Using these instantiations, we evaluate several dimensions of stream-based process discovery. The evaluation shows that the proposed architecture allows us to lift process discovery to the streaming domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Process discovery algorithms aim to capture process models from event logs. These algorithms have been designed for logs in which the events that belong to the same case are related to each other - and to that case - by means of a unique case identifier. However, in service-oriented systems, these case identifiers are rarely stored beyond request-response pairs, which makes it hard to relate events that belong to the same case. This is known as the correlation challenge. This paper addresses the correlation challenge by introducing a technique, called the correlation miner, that facilitates discovery of business process models when events are not associated with a case identifier. It extends previous work on the correlation miner, by not only enabling the discovery of the process model, but also detecting which events belong to the same case. Experiments performed on both synthetic and real-world event logs show the applicability of the correlation miner. The resulting technique enables us to observe a service-oriented system and determine - with high accuracy - which request-response pairs sent by different communicating parties are related to each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional process mining techniques offer limited possibilities to analyze business processes working in low-predictable and dynamic environments. Recently, to close this gap, declarative process models have been introduced to represent process mining results since they allow for describing complex behaviors as a compact set of business rules. However, in this context, activities of a business process are still considered as atomic/instantaneous events. This is a strong limitation for these approaches because often, in realistic environments, process activities are not instantaneous but executed across a time interval and pass through a sequence of states of a lifecycle. This paper investigates how the existing techniques for the discovery of declarative process models can be adapted when the business process under analysis contains non-atomic activities. In particular, we base our proposed approach on the use of discriminative rule mining to determine how the characteristics of the activity lifecycles in a business process influence the validity of a business rule in that process. The approach has been implemented as a plug-in of the process mining tool ProM and validated on synthetic logs and on a real-life log recorded by an incident and problem management system called VINST in use at Volvo IT Belgium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Process Mining, or Process Discovery, is a method for modeling the workflow of a business process from event logs. Business process models contain sequential and parallel traces. In this paper, a modification of the frequently used process-mining algorithm Heuristics Miner is proposed. The proposed algorithm is called Modified Time-based Heuristics Miner because it considers not only the sequence of activities but also the time-based information from the event log. It can effectively distinguish parallel (AND), single choice (XOR) and conditional (OR) patterns; the latter cannot be discovered by the original Heuristics Miner. The threshold intervals are determined on the basis of the average dependency measure in the dependency graph. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is able to discover concurrent business processes formed by parallel (AND) and conditional (OR) patterns, whereas the existing Heuristics Miner algorithm can only discover concurrent business processes formed by parallel (AND) patterns. This paper also provides an evaluation of validity and fitness of the discovered process model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two most prominent process mining tasks are process discovery (i.e., learning a process model from an event log) and conformance checking (i.e., diagnosing and quantifying differences between observed and modeled behavior). The increasing availability of event data makes these tasks highly relevant for process analysis and improvement. Therefore, process mining is considered to be one of the key technologies for Business Process Management (BPM). However, as event logs and process models grow, process mining becomes more challenging. Therefore, we propose an approach to decompose process mining problems into smaller problems using the notion of passages. A passage is a pair of two non-empty sets of activities (X, Y) such that the set of direct successors of X is Y and the set of direct predecessors of Y is X. Any Petri net can be partitioned using passages. Moreover, process discovery and conformance checking can be done per passage and the results can be aggregated. This has advantages in terms of efficiency and diagnostics. Moreover, passages can be used to distribute process mining problems over a network of computers. Passages are supported through ProM plug-ins that automatically decompose process discovery and conformance checking tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Computer applications, such as servers, databases and middleware, ubiquitously emit execution traces stored in log files. The use of logs for the analysis of application failures is known since the early days of computers. Field data studies have shown that application logs are fraught with uncertainty, i.e., missing or noisy events in the logs. A body of research that has dealt successfully with uncertainty in event logs is process mining from the business process management community, specifically by discovering process models. The literature has shown the value of process mining across several domains, but as yet there is no study that quantifies possible improvements from using process models, and the impact of uncertainty in the context of application failures. This work addresses the use of process mining for detecting failures from application logs. First, process models are discovered from logs; then conformance checking is used to detect deviations from the models. We contribute to knowledge engineering research with a systematic measurement study that quantifies the failure detection capability of conformance checking in spite of missing events, and its accuracy with respect to process models obtained from noisy logs. Analysis is done with a dataset of 55,462 execution traces from three independent real-life applications. We obtain a mixed answer depending on the application under test; our measurements provide insights into the use of process mining for failure analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]