Domain-Specific Event Abstraction

Real-life event logs are typically much less structured and more complex than the predefined business activities they refer to. Most of the existing process mining techniques assume that there is a one-to-one mapping between process model activities and events recorded during process execution. Unfortunately, event logs and process model activities are defined at different levels of granularity. The challenges posed by this discrepancy can be addressed by means of log-lifting. In this work we develop a machine-learning-based framework aimed at bridging the abstraction level gap between logs and process models. The proposed framework operates of two main phases: log segmentation and machine-learning-based classification. The purpose of the segmentation phase is to identify the potential segment separators in a flow of low-level events, in which each segment corresponds to an unknown high-level activity. For this, we propose a segmentation algorithm based on maximum likelihood with n-gram analysis. In the second phase, event segments are mapped into their corresponding high-level activities using a supervised machine learning technique. Several machine learning classification methods are explored including ANNs, SVMs, and random forest. We demonstrate the applicability of our framework using a real-life event log provided by the SAP company. The results obtained show that a machine learning approach based on the random forest algorithm outperforms the other methods with an accuracy of 96.4%. The testing time was found to be around 0.01s, which makes the algorithm a good candidate for real-time deployment scenarios.

Process mining-driven analysis of COVID-19’s impact on vaccination patterns

Process mining is widely adopted in organizations to gain deep insights about running business processes. This can be achieved by applying different process mining techniques like discovery, conformance checking, and performance analysis. These techniques are applied on event logs, which need to be extracted from the organization’s databases beforehand. This not only implies access to databases, but also detailed knowledge about the database schema, which is often not available. In many real-world scenarios, however, process execution data is available as redo logs. Such logs are used to bring a database into a consistent state in case of a system failure. This paper proposes a semi-automatic approach to extract an event log from redo logs alone. It does not require access to the database or knowledge of the databaseschema. The feasibility of the proposed approach is evaluated on two synthetic redo logs.

Event logs recorded during the execution of business processes constitute a valuable source of information. Applying process mining techniques to them, event logs may reveal the actual process execution and enable reasoning on quantitative or qualitative process properties. However, event logs often contain sensitive information that could be related to individual process stakeholders through background information and cross-correlation. We therefore argue that, when publishing event logs, the risk of such re-identification attacks must be considered. In this paper, we show how to quantify the re-identification risk with measures for the individual uniqueness in event logs. We also report on a large-scale study that explored the individual uniqueness in a collection of publicly available event logs. Our results suggest that potentially up to all of the cases in an event log may be re-identified, which highlights the importance of privacy-preserving techniques in process mining.

Conformance checking provides a set of techniques for comparing observed behavior (event logs) with process models. Health care providers apply it for verifying compliance between activities realized by the patients and clinical protocols. However, health care processes are characterized by high complexity and variability, and clinical protocols can have a level of granularity different from the one in the recorded events. We proposed a new method for configuring the cost function for the alignment-based conformance checking, handling the different levels of granularity to address this problem. The costs are configured based on grouping activities and the specification of undesirable events. We applied this method using the ProM Framework in a real-world dataset containing events from patients who realized a bariatric surgery in 2016. The technique can also be applied in other conformance checking scenarios, where the granularity of the events differs from the process model. The case study result allowed us to automatically identify critical violations of the clinical protocol by analyzing the fitness metric. The proposed method could help auditors to identify crucial cases.

Process Mining helps to analyze and interpret business processes using event logs of information systems as ground truth. It has been successfully applied to process-oriented enterprise systems but is less suited for communication- and document-oriented Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS). This is due to two core characteristics of ECS processes and process logging. On the one hand, ECS processes are highly unstructured as their usage is not related to predefined business processes. The usage of ECS is ad-hoc and flexible. On the other hand, ECS commonly provide rather low-level process logs, i. e., logged events are very fine-granular, and, thus hard to interpret. Both characteristics lead to so-called spaghetti process models, which are barely interpretable when applying “traditional” process mining to ECS. This work focuses on the second aspect, i. e., to solve the problem of too fine-granular process logs of ECS. A common solution and preprocessing step for this granularity challenge is event abstraction, i.e., converting low-level logs into more abstract high-level logs before applying further process mining analysis techniques. ECS logs come with special characteristics that have so far not been fully addressed by existing event abstraction approaches. We aim to close this gap with a tailored ECS event abstraction (ECSEA) approach that trains a model by comparing observed actual user activities (also named high-level traces) with the system-generated low-level traces. The model allows us to automatically convert historic and future low-level traces into abstracted high-level traces that can be used for Process Mining. This article describes the ECS event log characteristics, introduces the proposed ECSEA approach with the underlying algorithms, and shows a corresponding evaluation. Our two-fold evaluation shows that the algorithm produces accurate results. In the evaluation, we use both synthetic and real-world event data taken from a productive ECS with more than 4000 users currently running at a university. • Derivation of relevant low-level event log characteristics: Based on a comparison of low-level and related high-level event logs, we derive low-level event log characteristics. They serve as requirements for a novel event abstraction approach and are further used for a comparison of related approaches. • Conceptualization of a novel supervised event abstraction approach: The main contribution is a novel event abstraction algorithm, which is described and evaluated in this article.

Business process modelling is an important part of system design. When designing or redesigning a business process, stakeholders specify, negotiate, and agree on business requirements to be satisfied, including non-functional requirements that concern the quality of the business process. This thesis addresses the question of how to specify and compute the quality of a business process, given the model that stakeholders use. The motivation for this thesis is the increasing importance of the quality of business processes. Knowing the quality of specific business processes enables stakeholders to judge if these processes need improvement. Knowing the quality of the constructs of those processes (viz., events, inputs, activities, and outputs) and the way they are structured enables a more detailed analysis of their shortcomings and provides a basis for the design of improvements. The research challenge of this thesis is grounded in the assumption that: “Organisations need an appropriate means to effectively compute achievement of their goals and objectives by their business processes.” Given this challenge, the main research question on which this thesis focuses is: “Can the quality of a business process be computed quantitatively at different levels of granularity?” The research objective is: “To develop frameworks, factors, and metrics for computing non-functional requirements (quality) of business processes quantitatively at different levels of granularity.” The outcomes of this thesis are: 1) BPIMM, a language-independent business process integrating meta-model, based on the concepts of seven mainstream business process modelling languages: BPMN, EPC, RAD, UML AD, SADT, IDEF0, and IDEF3. 2) BPC-QC (Business Process Concept - Quality Computation), an approach to quality computation at the lowest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BPC-QEF (Business Process Concept - Quality Evaluation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of the constructs of a business process: event, input, activity, and output. ii. A set of business process quality dimensions and factors. The following quality dimensions are distinguished: performance, efficiency, reliability, recoverability, permissibility, and availability. Each dimension categorises different quality aspects in terms of factors. A non-exhaustive set of sixteen quantitative factors is provided. iii. Quality metrics for each of the quality factors, to facilitate a quantitative computation of the quality of a specific construct of a business process. 3) BP-QC (Business Process - Quality Computation), an approach to compute the quality at the highest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BP-CQCF (Business Process - Compositional Quality Computation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of a business process as a whole, given the quality of its constructs. ii. A set of generic business process modelling patterns to decompose a business process into more succinct parts, namely: sequential, parallel with synchronisation, exclusive, inclusive, simple loop, and complex loop. iii. A set of over one hundred computational formulae. For each combination of modelling pattern and a quality factor, there is a formula to compute the quality. 4) AAV (Approach to Application and Validation), an evaluation plan to evaluate BPIMM, BPC-QC and BP-QC in practice, together with expert stakeholders. The plan consists of the units of measure, a measurement model, and a case study procedure. To evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis to real world business needs, four case studies have been conducted in different environments: a Dutch educational institution, a global financial institution, an international financial service provider, and a Dutch research project on crisis management. Each of these case studies concerns a different, single business process. This thesis shows that: 1) A quality computation approach can be adopted independent of a business process modelling language. 2) Quantitative quality factors can be introduced specifically for the constructs of a business process. 3) Quantitative metrics and computational formulae can be developed for specific quality factors, allowing the computation of different aspects of the quality of a business process quantitatively at different levels of granularity. 4) An evaluation plan can be developed to evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis (viz., BPIMM, BPC-QC, and BP-QC). The contributions of this thesis are designed to be beneficial to the areas of business and management, requirements engineering, software engineering, and business process modelling. In the areas of requirements engineering and software engineering, these contributions are intended to help practitioners to consider non-functional requirements at the earliest stage. In the area of business process modelling, information systems, service computing, and cloud computing, the contributions can be used for quality-driven modelling, design, and redesign. To conclude, knowing the quality value of a business process at different levels of granularity provides a basis for its improvement.

Process mining is an emerging discipline incorporating methods and tools for the analysis of system/process executions captured in the form of event logs [1]. Traditionally process mining can be divided into three research areas: discovery (construction of process models from event logs), conformance checking (finding log and model deviations), and enhancement of existing process models with additional event log data.BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) 2.0 [2] is a widely used process modeling notation, supported by various process modeling and analysis tools, and is a de-facto process modeling standard. Using BPMN within process mining opens perspectives for applicability of the existing process mining techniques: for instance discovered process models can be analyzed or enacted using existing BPMN-based software, and vice versa, manually created models can be imported to a process mining tool, verified against event logs, and enhanced with additional data.In this work we bridge the gap between conventional process modeling formalisms used in the context of process mining (e.g., Petri nets, causal nets, process trees) and BPMN. For that purpose we developed a suite of conversion algorithms and provide formal guarantees relating the behavior of Petri nets (including non-free-choice nets) to the corresponding BPMN models (and vice versa). The derived relations are used to enhance the BPMN models with information learned from the event logs.The developed conversion techniques are described in detail in [3] and have been implemented [4] as a part of ProM (Process Mining Framework) [5] -- an open source tool for process mining and verified on real event log data. Moreover, cases for which conversion algorithms give more compact process models in comparison with the initial models are identified. Although the developed algorithms deal with basic control flow constructs only, they can be applied in the discovery of advanced BPMN modeling elements [2], including subprocesses [6-7], cancellations [8], conditional branching and data objects, swimlanes, message flows, and others.

The applicability of process mining techniques hinges on the availability of event logs capturing the execution of a business process. In some use cases, particularly those involving customer-facing processes, these event logs may contain private information. Data protection regulations restrict the use of such event logs for analysis purposes. One way of circumventing these restrictions is to anonymize the event log to the extent that no individual can be singled out using the anonymized log. This paper addresses the problem of anonymizing an event log in order to guarantee that, upon disclosure of the anonymized log, the probability that an attacker may single out any individual represented in the original log, does not increase by more than a threshold. The paper proposes a differentially private disclosure mechanism, which oversamples the cases in the log and adds noise to the timestamps to the extent required to achieve the above privacy guarantee. The paper reports on an empirical evaluation of the proposed approach using 14 real-life event logs in terms of data utility loss and computational efficiency.

Both the fields of Process Mining (PM) and Visual Analytics (VA) aim to make complex phenomena understandable. In PM, the goal is to gain insights into the execution of complex processes by analyzing the event data that is captured in event logs. This data is inherently multi-faceted, meaning that it covers various data facets, including spatial and temporal dependencies, relations between data entities (such as cases/events), and multivariate data attributes per entity. However, the multi-faceted nature of the data has not received much attention in PM. Conversely, VA research has investigated interactive visual methods for making multi-faceted data understandable for about two decades. In this study, we bring together PM and VA with the goal of advancing toward Visual Process Analytics (VPA) of multi-faceted processes. To this end, we present a systematic view of relevant (VA) data facets in the context of PM and assess to what extent existing PM visualizations address the data facets’ characteristics, making use of VA guidelines. In addition to visualizations, we look at how PM can benefit from analytical abstraction and interaction techniques known in the VA realm. Based on this, we discuss open challenges and opportunities for future research towards multi-faceted VPA.

Predicting the remaining time of production orders is a critical task in the manufacturing sector, particularly for professionals involved in production planning and control (PPC). These managers frequently face substantial uncertainty when estimating delivery commitments to customers. Numerous techniques have been applied to address this challenge, including neural networks, time series models, and non-parametric statistical approaches. Among the emerging methodologies, process mining has proven particularly effective in leveraging event logs to extract insights into the actual execution of business processes. This study introduces a hybrid predictive model that integrates annotated transition systems with machine learning techniques to enhance the accuracy of remaining time predictions for ongoing production orders in industrial settings. The combination of predictive models is achieved through the optimization of a linear programming formulation that minimizes the aggregate absolute error. The proposed approach was evaluated using both synthetic event logs and real-world data from a manufacturing company. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms all benchmarked techniques in terms of prediction accuracy across test scenarios. Across the three tested products, the hybrid model consistently obtained the lowest MAE, improving accuracy up to 12% relative to baseline and state-of-the-art machine-learning models.

AITIA-PM: Discovering the true causes of events in a process mining context

Process mining (PM) is a technique to extract a process model from an event log to represent the process behaviour recorded in that event log. A mined process model with high fitness means that it can reflect most of the process behaviour recorded in the event log. Previous studies have shown that the mined model with high fitness can be used in process improvement, such as fraud detection, continuous process improvement and benchmarking. Genetic process mining (GPM) is a famous PM approach, which can simultaneously identify several process structures from event logs. However, GPM cannot effectively discover parallel structures from event logs. This study proposes a PM approach based on integration of GPM, particle swarm optimisation and differential evolution to find process models with high fitness for event logs involving multiple parallel structures. The results show that the proposed approach does indeed lead to improvement in gaining process models with high fitness for event logs involving multiple parallel structures.

Since IoT devices supporting business processes (BPs) in sectors like manufacturing, logistics or healthcare can collect data on the execution of the processes, there is a growing awareness of the opportunity to use IoT data for process mining (PM). However, several challenges need to be addressed to enable IoT-enhanced PM, among which the need for a standard IoT-enhanced event log model. In this paper, we identify four main challenges for the integration of IoT data in event logs, from which 10 requirements for an IoT-enhanced event log model are derived. We then analyse the two main current event log models, the extensible event stream (XES) and the object-centric event log (OCEL), and confront them with the requirements, showing that both present important limitations to storing IoT-enhanced event logs. Based on this analysis, we conclude that a comprehensive data model is required to develop more advanced IoT-enhanced PM techniques .KeywordsProcess miningIoTIoT-enhanced event log

Batch processing refers to an organization of work in which cases are synchronized such that they can be processed as a group. Prior research has studied batch processing mainly from a deductive angle, trying to identify optimal rules for composing batches. As a consequence, we lack methodological support to investigate according to which rules human resources build batches in work settings where batching rules are not strictly enforced. In this paper, we address this research gap by developing a technique to inductively mine batch activation rules from process execution data. The obtained batch activation rules can be used for various purposes, including to explicate the real-life batching behavior of human resources; to determine the compliance between the prescribed and actual batching behavior; or to investigate the influence of alternative batching behavior on service levels. The evaluation of our technique using both synthetic and real-world data demonstrates its effectiveness. With this work we complement prescriptive research on batch processing with a descriptive technique that is empirically grounded in process execution data.