R. P. Jagadeesh Chandra Bose

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.

Handling concept drift in process mining

Operational processes need to change to adapt to changing circumstances, e.g., new legislation, extreme variations in supply and demand, seasonal effects, etc.While the topic of flexibility is well-researched in the BPM domain, contemporary process mining approaches assume the process to be in steady state. When discovering a process model from event logs, it is assumed that the process at the beginning of the recorded period is the same as the process at the end of the recorded period. Obviously, this is often not the case due to the phenomenon known as concept drift. While cases are being handled, the process itself may be changing. This paper presents an approach to analyze such second-order dynamics. The approach has been implemented in ProM1 and evaluated by analyzing an evolving process.

Process diagnostics using trace alignment: Opportunities, issues, and challenges

Business processes leave trails in a variety of data sources (e.g., audit trails, databases, and transaction logs). Hence, every process instance can be described by a trace, i.e., a sequence of events. Process mining techniques are able to extract knowledge from such traces and provide a welcome extension to the repertoire of business process analysis techniques. Recently, process mining techniques have been adopted in various commercial BPM systems (e.g., BPM|one, Futura Reflect, ARIS PPM, Fujitsu Interstage, Businesscape, Iontas PDF, and QPR PA). Unfortunately, traditional process discovery algorithms have problems dealing with less structured processes. The resulting models are difficult to comprehend or even misleading. Therefore, we propose a new approach based on trace alignment. The goal is to align traces in such a way that event logs can be explored easily. Trace alignment can be used to explore the process in the early stages of analysis and to answer specific questions in later stages of analysis. Hence, it complements existing process mining techniques focusing on discovery and conformance checking. The proposed techniques have been implemented as plugins in the ProM framework. We report the results of trace alignment on one synthetic and two real-life event logs, and show that trace alignment has significant promise in process diagnostic efforts.

Trace clustering based on conserved patterns : towards achieving better process models

Process mining refers to the extraction of process models from event logs. Real-life processes tend to be less structured and more flexible. Traditional process mining algorithms have problems dealing with such unstructured processes and generate “spaghetti-like” process models that are hard to comprehend. An approach to overcome this is to cluster process instances such that each of the resulting clusters correspond to coherent sets of process instances that can each be adequately represented by a process model. In this paper, we present multiple feature sets based on conserved patterns and show that the proposed feature sets have a better performance than contemporary approaches. We evaluate the goodness of the formed clusters using established fitness and comprehensibility metrics defined in the context of process mining. The proposed approach is able to generate clusters such that the process models mined from the clustered traces show a high degree of fitness and comprehensibility. Further, the proposed feature sets can be easily discovered in linear time making it amenable to real-time analysis of large data sets.

Efficient discovery of understandable declarative process models from event logs

Process mining techniques often reveal that real-life processes are more variable than anticipated. Although declarative process models are more suitable for less structured processes, most discovery techniques generate conventional procedural models. In this paper, we focus on discovering Declare models based on event logs. A Declare model is composed of temporal constraints. Despite the suitability of declarative process models for less structured processes, their discovery is far from trivial. Even for smaller processes there are many potential constraints. Moreover, there may be many constraints that are trivially true and that do not characterize the process well. Naively checking all possible constraints is computationally intractable and may lead to models with an excessive number of constraints. Therefore, we have developed an Apriori algorithm to reduce the search space. Moreover, we use new metrics to prune the model. As a result, we can quickly generate understandable Declare models for real-life event logs.

Abstractions in Process Mining: A Taxonomy of Patterns

Process mining refers to the extraction of process models from event logs. Real-life processes tend to be less structured and more flexible. Traditional process mining algorithms have problems dealing with such unstructured processes and generate spaghetti-like process models that are hard to comprehend. One reason for such a result can be attributed to constructing process models from raw traces without due pre-processing. In an event log, there can be instances where the system is subjected to similar execution patterns/behavior. Discovery of common patterns of invocation of activities in traces (beyond the immediate succession relation) can help in improving the discovery of process models and can assist in defining the conceptual relationship between the tasks/activities. In this paper, we characterize and explore the manifestation of commonly used process model constructs in the event log and adopt pattern definitions that capture these manifestations, and propose a means to form abstractions over these patterns. We also propose an iterative method of transformation of traces which can be applied as a pre-processing step for most of todays process mining techniques . The proposed approaches are shown to identify promising patterns and conceptually-valid abstractions on a real-life log. The patterns discussed in this paper have multiple applications such as trace clustering, fault diagnosis/anomaly detection besides being an enabler for hierarchical process discovery.

Trace alignment in process mining: opportunities for process diagnostics

Process mining techniques attempt to extract non-trivial knowledge and interesting insights from event logs. Process mining provides a welcome extension of the repertoire of business process analysis techniques and has been adopted in various commercial BPM systems (BPM|one, Futura Reflect, ARIS PPM, Fujitsu, etc.). Unfortunately, traditional process discovery algorithms have problems dealing with lessstructured processes. The resulting models are difficult to comprehend or even misleading. Therefore, we propose a new approach based on trace alignment. The goal is to align traces in a way that event logs can be explored easily. Trace alignment can be used in a preprocessing phase where the event log is investigated or filtered and in later phases where detailed questions need to be answered. Hence, it complements existing process mining techniques focusing on discovery and conformance checking.

Dealing With Concept Drifts in Process Mining

Although most business processes change over time, contemporary process mining techniques tend to analyze these processes as if they are in a steady state. Processes may change suddenly or gradually. The drift may be periodic (e.g., because of seasonal influences) or one-of-a-kind (e.g., the effects of new legislation). For the process management, it is crucial to discover and understand such concept drifts in processes. This paper presents a generic framework and specific techniques to detect when a process changes and to localize the parts of the process that have changed. Different features are proposed to characterize relationships among activities. These features are used to discover differences between successive populations. The approach has been implemented as a plug-in of the ProM process mining framework and has been evaluated using both simulated event data exhibiting controlled concept drifts and real-life event data from a Dutch municipality.

A knowledge-based integrated approach for discovering and repairing declare maps

Process mining techniques can be used to discover process models from event data. Often the resulting models are complex due to the variability of the underlying process. Therefore, we aim at discovering declarative process models that can deal with such variability. However, for real-life event logs involving dozens of activities and hundreds or thousands of cases, there are often many potential constraints resulting in cluttered diagrams. Therefore, we propose various techniques to prune these models and remove constraints that are not interesting or implied by other constraints. Moreover, we show that domain knowledge (e.g., a reference model or grouping of activities) can be used to guide the discovery approach. The approach has been implemented in the process mining tool ProM and evaluated using an event log from a large Dutch hospital. Even in such highly variable environments, our approach can discover understandable declarative models.

Mining Context-Dependent and Interactive Business Process Maps Using Execution Patterns

Process mining techniques attempt to extract non-trivial knowledge and interesting insights from event logs. Process models can be seen as the “maps” describing the operational processes of organizations. Unfortunately, traditional process discovery algorithms have problems dealing with less-structured processes. Furthermore, existing discovery algorithms do not consider the analyst’s context of analysis. As a result, the current models (i.e., “maps”) are difficult to comprehend or even misleading. To address this problem, we propose a two-phase approach based on common execution patterns. First, the user selects relevant and context-dependent patterns. These patterns are used to obtain an event log at a higher abstraction level. Subsequently, the transformed log is used to create a hierarchical process map. The approach has been implemented in the context of ProM. Using a real-life log of a housing agency we demonstrate that we can use this approach to create maps that (i) depict desired traits, (ii) eliminate irrelevant details, (iii) reduce complexity, and (iv) improve comprehensibility.