Christopher Turner

Process Mining Manifesto

Process mining techniques are able to extract knowledge from event logs commonly available in today’s information systems. These techniques provide new means to discover, monitor, and improve processes in a variety of application domains. There are two main drivers for the growing interest in process mining. On the one hand, more and more events are being recorded, thus, providing detailed information about the history of processes. On the other hand, there is a need to improve and support business processes in competitive and rapidly changing environments. This manifesto is created by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining and aims to promote the topic of process mining. Moreover, by defining a set of guiding principles and listing important challenges, this manifesto hopes to serve as a guide for software developers, scientists, consultants, business managers, and end-users. The goal is to increase the maturity of process mining as a new tool to improve the (re)design, control, and support of operational business processes.

A review of business process mining: state‐of‐the‐art and future trends

Purpose – This paper seeks to examine the area of business process mining, providing an overview of state‐of‐the‐art techniques. An outline of the main problems experienced in the practice of process mining is given along with reference to work that addresses the most challenging issues experienced in this field. This paper also aims to examine the application of soft computing techniques to process‐mining problems.Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based on a comprehensive review of literature covering more than 50 research papers. These papers are analysed to identify current trends and future research directions in the field.Findings – Process‐mining techniques are now becoming available as graphical interface‐driven software tools, where flow diagram representations of processes may be manipulated as part of the mining task. A significant number of papers employ mining heuristics to aid in the task of process discovery. Soft computing algorithms are increasingly being investigated to aid the ...

A framework for implementing cost and quality practices within manufacturing

Purpose – The techniques that help organisations implement leading edge cost and quality practices in manufacturing operations management are typically disparate and generic in nature. There is a need to identify integrated practices at the right level of granularity, based on a clear definition of the existing operations practices. This paper proposes a novel framework for achieving and maintaining good cost and quality operations management practice within a manufacturing environment.Design/methodology/approach – The framework uses a new approach for identifying the profile of current activities and better practice activities for the roles of team leaders, cell leaders and operations managers within a manufacturing company.Findings – The paper proposes a recommended set of context‐specific activities for these roles. These recommended activities are utilised to develop a cascade of deployable recommendations.Originality/value – The framework is illustrated within a manufacturing environment producing co...

A genetic programming approach to business process mining

The aim of process mining is to identify and extract process patterns from data logs to reconstruct an overall process flowchart. As business processes become more and more complex there is a need for managers to understand the processes they already have in place. To undertake such a task manually would be extremely time consuming so the practice of process mining attempts to automatically reconstruct the correct representation of a process based on a set of process execution traces. This paper outlines an alternative approach to business process mining utilising a Genetic Programming (GP) technique coupled with a graph based representation. The graph based representation allows greater flexibility in the analysis of process flowchart structure and offers the possibility of mining complex business processes from incomplete or problematic event logs. A number of event logs have been mined by the GP technique featured in this paper and the results of the experimentation point towards the potential of this novel process mining approach.

Process mining: from theory to practice

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present a comparison of a number of business process mining tools currently available in the UK market. An outline of the practice of business process mining is given, along with an analysis of the main techniques developed by academia and commercial entities. This paper also acts as a primer for the acceptance and further use of process mining in industry, suggesting future directions for this practice.Design/methodology/approach – Secondary research has been completed to establish the main commercial business process mining tool vendors for the market. A literature survey has also been undertaken into the latest theoretical techniques being developed in the field of business process mining.Findings – The authors have identified a number of existing commercially available business process mining tools and have listed their capabilities within a comparative analysis table. All commercially available business process mining tools included in this paper are capable ...

Discrete Event Simulation and Virtual Reality Use in Industry: New Opportunities and Future Trends

This paper reviews the area of combined discrete event simulation (DES) and virtual reality (VR) use within industry. While establishing a state of the art for progress in this area, this paper makes the case for VR DES as the vehicle of choice for complex data analysis through interactive simulation models, highlighting both its advantages and current limitations. This paper reviews active research topics such as VR and DES real-time integration, communication protocols, system design considerations, model validation, and applications of VR and DES. While summarizing future research directions for this technology combination, the case is made for smart factory adoption of VR DES as a new platform for scenario testing and decision making. It is put that in order for VR DES to fully meet the visualization requirements of both Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet visions of digital manufacturing, further research is required in the areas of lower latency image processing, DES delivery as a service, gesture recognition for VR DES interaction, and linkage of DES to real-time data streams and Big Data sets.

A review on design for manufacture of variable stiffness composite laminates

The use of curvilinear fibre paths to develop variable stiffness laminates is now recognised as a promising technique offering great potential for performance improvements over conventional ‘straight fibre’ laminates. Its manufacture is feasible by fibre placement technologies, such as automated fibre placement. However, these technologies present a set of limitations that need to be included in the design to guarantee the manufacturability and quality of the composite laminates. Although this approach experiences an increasing interest from the specialised literature, most of the works completed overlook the manufacturing reality and, as a result, variable stiffness laminates are not used in industry. This work aims to provide a review of the State-of-the-Art on design for manufacture of variable stiffness in order to highlight the current gaps and research needs. As a conclusion, tools for analysis of the effect of manufacturing defects, manufacturing optimisation of gaps/overlaps or cycle time and the systematic integration of manufacturing constraints in design, are the main challenges that will be faced in the future to be able to exploit the potential of this advanced tailoring technique.

Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimisation of Business Processes

This paper discusses the problem of business process optimisation within a multi-objective evolutionary framework. Business process optimisation is considered as the problem of constructing feasible business process designs with optimum attribute values such as duration and cost. The proposed approach involves the application of a series of Evolutionary Multi-objective Optimisation Algorithms (EMOAs) in an attempt to generate a series of diverse optimised business process designs for the same process requirements. The proposed optimisation framework introduces a quantitative representation of business processes involving two matrices one for capturing the process design and one for calculating and evaluating the process attributes. It also introduces an algorithm that checks the feasibility of each candidate solution (i.e. process design). The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed optimisation framework is capable of producing a satisfactory number of optimised design alternatives considering the problem complexity and high rate of infeasibility.

Understanding the fate and transport of petroleum hydrocarbons from coal tar within gasholders

Coal tars have been identified as posing a threat to human health due to their toxic, mutagenic and carcinogenic characteristics. Workers involved in former gasholders decommissioning are potentially exposed to relevant concentrations of volatile and semi-volatile hydrocarbons upon opening up derelict tanks and during tar excavation/removal. While information on contaminated sites air-quality and its implications on medium-long term exposure is available, acute exposure issues associated with the execution of critical tasks are less understood. Calculations indicated that the concentration of a given contaminant in the gasholder vapour phase only depends on the coal tar composition, being only barely affected by the presence of water in the gasholder and the tar volume/void space ratio. Fugacity modelling suggested that risk-critical compounds such as benzene, naphthalene and other monocyclic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons may gather in the gasholder air phase at significant concentrations. Gasholder emissions were measured on-site and compared with the workplace exposure limits (WELs) currently in use in UK. While levels for most of the toxic compounds were far lower than WELs, benzene air-concentrations where found to be above the accepted threshold. In addition due to the long exposure periods involved in gasholder decommissioning and the significant contribution given by naphthalene to the total coal tar vapour concentration, the adoption of a WEL for naphthalene may need to be considered to support operators in preventing human health risk at the workplace. The Level I fugacity approach used in this study demonstrated its suitability for applications to sealed environments such as gasholders and its further refining could provide a useful tool for land remediation risk assessors.

A review of key planning and scheduling in the rail industry in Europe and UK

Planning and scheduling activities within the rail industry have benefited from developments in computer-based simulation and modelling techniques over the last 25 years. Increasingly, the use of computational intelligence in such tasks is featuring more heavily in research publications. This paper examines a number of common rail-based planning and scheduling activities and how they benefit from five broad technology approaches. Summary tables of papers are provided relating to rail planning and scheduling activities and to the use of expert and decision systems in the rail industry.