Evaluation of Public Funding Processes by Mining Event Logs

Abstract

The European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) are financial tools set up to invest in job creation and a sustainable and healthy European economy and environment. The criticality of these processes in terms of the time constraints, the large budgets, and the heterogeneity of the funded projects pose significant challenges to their management and evaluation. On the other hand, the emergence of Process Intelligence opens the door to new ways of managing public funding processes that ensure increased efficiency. In this paper, we propose a process mining based approach for analyzing delays, bottlenecks, and variations in process execution, thus setting the priorities for process improvements in the domain of public funding programs. We applied the proposed approach in the administrative verification of expenditure of the Partnership Agreement for the Development Framework (PA)). The results show that process mining is able to provide significant insights regarding delays, bottlenecks, and variations in process execution, thus setting the priorities for process improvement.