Hmw Eric Verbeek

The prom framework: a new era in process mining tool support

Under the umbrella of buzzwords such as “Business Activity Monitoring” (BAM) and “Business Process Intelligence” (BPI) both academic (e.g., EMiT, Little Thumb, InWoLvE, Process Miner, and MinSoN) and commercial tools (e.g., ARIS PPM, HP BPI, and ILOG JViews) have been developed. The goal of these tools is to extract knowledge from event logs (e.g., transaction logs in an ERP system or audit trails in a WFM system), i.e., to do process mining. Unfortunately, tools use different formats for reading/storing log files and present their results in different ways. This makes it difficult to use different tools on the same data set and to compare the mining results. Furthermore, some of these tools implement concepts that can be very useful in the other tools but it is often difficult to combine tools. As a result, researchers working on new process mining techniques are forced to build a mining infrastructure from scratch or test their techniques in an isolated way, disconnected from any practical applications. To overcome these kind of problems, we have developed the ProM framework, i.e., an “pluggable” environment for process mining. The framework is flexible with respect to the input and output format, and is also open enough to allow for the easy reuse of code during the implementation of new process mining ideas. This paper introduces the ProM framework and gives an overview of the plug-ins that have been developed.

Diagnosing workflow processes using Woflan

Workflow management technology promises a flexible solution for business-process support facilitating the easy creation of new business processes and modification of existing processes. Unfortunately, today’s workflow products have no support for workflow verification. Errors made at design-time are not detected and result in very costly failures at run-time. This paper presents the verification tool Woflan. Woflan analyzes workflow process definitions downloaded from commercial workflow products using state-of-the-art Petri-net-based analysis techniques. This paper describes the functionality of Woflan emphasizing diagnostics to locate the source of a design error. Woflan is evaluated via two case studies, one involving 20 groups of students designing a complex workflow process and one involving an industrial workflow process designed by Staffware Benelux. The results are encouraging and show that Woflan guides the user in finding and correcting errors in the design of workflows. Received 27 September 2000; revised 8 March 2001

Process mining : A two-step approach to balance between underfitting and overfitting

Process mining includes the automated discovery of processes from event logs. Based on observed events (e.g., activities being executed or messages being exchanged) a process model is constructed. One of the essential problems in process mining is that one cannot assume to have seen all possible behavior. At best, one has seen a representative subset. Therefore, classical synthesis techniques are not suitable as they aim at finding a model that is able to exactly reproduce the log. Existing process mining techniques try to avoid such “overfitting” by generalizing the model to allow for more behavior. This generalization is often driven by the representation language and very crude assumptions about completeness. As a result, parts of the model are “overfitting” (allow only for what has actually been observed) while other parts may be “underfitting” (allow for much more behavior without strong support for it). None of the existing techniques enables the user to control the balance between “overfitting” and “underfitting”. To address this, we propose a two-step approach. First, using a configurable approach, a transition system is constructed. Then, using the “theory of regions”, the model is synthesized. The approach has been implemented in the context of ProM and overcomes many of the limitations of traditional approaches.

Soundness of workflow nets: classification, decidability, and analysis

Workflow nets, a particular class of Petri nets, have become one of the standard ways to model and analyze workflows. Typically, they are used as an abstraction of the workflow that is used to check the so-called soundness property. This property guarantees the absence of livelocks, deadlocks, and other anomalies that can be detected without domain knowledge. Several authors have proposed alternative notions of soundness and have suggested to use more expressive languages, e.g., models with cancellations or priorities. This paper provides an overview of the different notions of soundness and investigates these in the presence of different extensions of workflow nets. We will show that the eight soundness notions described in the literature are decidable for workflow nets. However, most extensions will make all of these notions undecidable. These new results show the theoretical limits of workflow verification. Moreover, we discuss some of the analysis approaches described in the literature.

Advances in business process management

This special issue of Data & Knowledge Engineering contains extended versions of four papers selected from the best papers of the ‘‘International Conference on Business Process Management: On the Application of Formal Methods to Process-Aware Information Systems’’ that took place in Eindhoven (The Netherlands) in June 2003. To put the contributions to this special issue into a wider perspective, we first provide a brief overview of the scientific and practical issues in the context of Business Process Management (BPM) systems, followed by a brief introduction of the selected papers.

Detection and prediction of errors in EPCs of the SAP reference model

Up to now there is neither data available on how many errors can be expected in process model collections, nor is it understood why errors are introduced. In this article, we provide empirical evidence for these questions based on the SAP reference model. This model collection contains about 600 process models expressed as Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs). We translated these EPCs into YAWL models, and analyzed them using the verification tool WofYAWL. We discovered that at least 34 of these EPCs contain errors. Moreover, we used logistic regression to show that complexity of EPCs has a significant impact on error probability.

XES, XESame, and ProM 6

Process mining has emerged as a new way to analyze business processes based on event logs. These events logs need to be extracted from operational systems and can subsequently be used to discover or check the conformance of processes. ProM is a widely used tool for process mining. In earlier versions of ProM, MXML was used as an input format. In future releases of ProM, a new logging format will be used: the eXtensible Event Stream (XES) format. This format has several advantages over MXML. The paper presents two tools that use this format - XESame and ProM 6 - and highlights the main innovations and the role of XES. XESame enables domain experts to specify how the event log should be extracted from existing systems and converted to XES. ProM 6 is a completely new process mining framework based on XES and enabling innovative process mining functionality.

Life after BPEL

The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) has emerged as a standard for specifying and executing processes. It is supported by vendors such as IBM and Microsoft and positioned as the “process language of the Internet”. This paper provides a critical analysis of BPEL based on the so-called workflow patterns. It also discusses the need for languages like BPEL. Finally, the paper addresses several challenges not directly addressed by BPEL but highly relevant to the support of web services.

Verification of the SAP reference models using EPC reduction, state-space analysis, and invariants

A reference model is a generic conceptual model that formalizes recommended practices for a certain domain. Today, the SAP reference models are among the most comprehensive reference models, including over 4000 entity types and covering over 1000 business processes and inter-organizational scenarios. The SAP reference models use Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs) to model these processes and scenarios. Like other informal languages, EPCs are intended to support the transition from a business model to an executable model. For this reason, researchers have tried to formalize the semantics of EPCs. However, in their approaches, they fail to acknowledge the fact that in EPCs constructs exist that require human judgment to assess correctness. This paper aims to acknowledge this fact by introducing a two-step approach. First, the EPC is reduced using universally accepted reduction rules. Second, the reduced EPC is analyzed using a mixture of state-space analysis, invariants, and human judgment. This approach has been implemented in a tool, and applying this tool to the SAP reference models showed that these contain errors, which clearly shows the added value of this verification approach.

Business process verification – finally a reality!

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