Process Diagnostics: A Method Based on Process Mining

Information systems should contribute to enterprise effectiveness, and usually do so during the operational phase of their lifecycle. From the experience of practitioners, the duration of this lifecycle is often not predetermined, therefore resulting in information systems with a relatively long lifespan and information systems with a relatively short lifespan. An important aspect of application management, is managing the application lifecycle. In the experience of practitioners, deciding the moment to end the lifecycle, refactor it, or leave it be are often not thoroughly researched. The decision to move on to a newer information system is therefore not always sufficiently justified and relies more on a gut feeling. What if the older information system is still able to perform and comply with the changes the enterprise desires? Prolonging the length of an application lifecycle could result in cost reduction in an application portfolio. In this paper, we aim to create a method of assessment of the ability to change of a legacy information system and identifying potential areas in which a legacy information system would need improvement in order to increase this ability to change.

Process mining is a discipline that uses techniques to extract knowledge from event logs recorded by information systems in most companies these days. Among main perspectives of process mining, organizational and time perspectives focus on information about resources stored on the event logs and timing and frequency of the events, respectively. In this paper we introduce a method that combines organizational and time perspectives of process mining with a decision support tool called decision trees. The method takes the information of historical process data by means of an event log, generates a decision tree, annotates the decision tree with processing times, and recommends the best performer for a given running instance of the process. We finally illustrate the method through several experiments using a developed plug-in for the process mining framework ProM, first using synthetic data and then using a real-life event log.

The topic of process mining has attracted the attention of both researchers and tool vendors in the Business Process Management (BPM) space. The goal of process mining is to discover process models from event logs, i.e., events logged by some information system are used to extract information about activities and their causal relations. Several algorithms have been proposed for process mining. Many of these algorithms cannot deal with concurrency. Other typical problems are the presence of duplicate activities, hidden activities, non-free-choice constructs, etc. In addition, real-life logs contain noise (e.g., exceptions or incorrectly logged events) and are typically incomplete (i.e., the event logs contain only a fragment of all possible behaviors). To tackle these problems we propose a completely new approach based on genetic algorithms. As can be expected, a genetic approach is able to deal with noise and incompleteness. However, it is not easy to represent processes properly in a genetic setting. In this paper, we show a genetic process mining approach using the so-called causal matrix as a representation for individuals. We elaborate on the relation between Petri nets and this representation and show that genetic algorithms can be used to discover Petri net models from event logs.KeywordsProcess MiningPetri NetsGenetic AlgorithmsProcess DiscoveryBusiness Process IntelligenceBusiness Activity Monitoring

Increasingly organizations are using process mining to understand the way that operational processes are executed. Process mining can be used to systematically drive innovation in a digitalized world. Next to the automated discovery of the real underlying process, there are process-mining techniques to analyze bottlenecks, to uncover hidden inefficiencies, to check compliance, to explain deviations, to predict performance, and to guide users towards “better” processes. Dozens (if not hundreds) of process-mining techniques are available and their value has been proven in many case studies. However, process mining stands or falls with the availability of event logs. Existing techniques assume that events are clearly defined and refer to precisely one case (i.e. process instance) and one activity (i.e., step in the process). Although there are systems that directly generate such event logs (e.g., BPM/WFM systems), most information systems do not record events explicitly. Cases and activities only exist implicitly. However, when creating or using process models “raw data” need to be linked to cases and activities. This paper uses a novel perspective to conceptualize a database view on event data. Starting from a class model and corresponding object models it is shown that events correspond to the creation, deletion, or modification of objects and relations. The key idea is that events leave footprints by changing the underlying database. Based on this an approach is described that scopes, binds, and classifies data to create “flat” event logs that can be analyzed using traditional process-mining techniques.

Many present-day companies carry out a huge amount of daily operations through the use of their information systems without ever having done their own enterprise modeling. Business process mining is a well-proven solution which is used to discover the underlying business process models that are supported by existing information systems. Business process discovery techniques employ event logs as input, which are recorded by process-aware information systems. However, a wide variety of traditional information systems do not have any in-built mechanisms with which to collect events (representing the execution of business activities). Various mechanisms with which to collect events from non-process-aware information systems have been proposed in order to enable the application of process mining techniques to traditional information systems. Unfortunately, since business processes supported by traditional information systems are implicitly defined, correlating events into the appropriate process instance is not trivial. This challenge is known as the event correlation problem. This paper presents an adaptation of an existing event correlation algorithm and incorporates it into a technique in order to collect event logs from the execution of traditional information systems. The technique first instruments the source code to collect events together with some candidate correlation attributes. Based on several well-known design patterns, the technique provides a set of guidelines to support experts when instrumenting the source code. The event correlation algorithm is subsequently applied to the data set of events to discover the best correlation conditions, which are then used to create event logs. The technique has been semi-automated to facilitate its validation through an industrial case study involving a writer management system and a healthcare evaluation system. The study demonstrates that the technique is able to discover an appropriate correlation set and obtain well-formed event logs, thus enabling business process mining techniques to be applied to traditional information systems.

Process mining uses event data recorded by information systems to reveal the actual execution of business processes in organizations. By doing this, event logs can expose sensitive information that may be attributed back to individuals (e.g., reveal information on the performance of individual employees). Due to GDPR organizations are obliged to consider privacy throughout the complete development process, which also applies to the design of process mining systems. The aim of this paper is to develop a privacy-preserving system design for process mining. The user-centered view on the system design allows to track who does what, when, why, where and how with personal data. The approach is demonstrated on an IoT manufacturing use case.

Process mining in healthcare: A literature review

Business processes in dentistry are quickly evolving towards 'digital dentistry'. This means that many steps in the dental process will increasingly deal with computerized information or computerized half products. A complicating factor in the improvement of process performance in dentistry, however, is the large number of independent dental professionals that are involved in the entire process. In order to reap the benefits of digital dentistry, it is essential to obtain an accurate view on the current processes in practice. In this paper, so called process mining techniques are applied in order to demonstrate that, based on automatically stored data, detailed process knowledge can be obtained on dental processes, e.g. it can be discovered how dental processes are actually executed. To this end, we analyze a real case of a private dental practice, which is responsible for the treatment of patients (diagnosis, placing of implants and the placement of the final restoration), and the dental lab that is responsible for the production of the final restoration. To determine the usefulness of process mining, the entire process has been investigated from three different perspectives: (1) the control-flow perspective, (2) the organizational perspective and (3) the performance perspective. The results clearly show that process mining is useful to gain a deep understanding of dental processes. Also, it becomes clear that dental process are rather complex, which require a considerable amount of flexibility. We argue that the introduction of workflow management technology is needed in order to make digital dentistry a success.

Significant stochastic dependencies in process models

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.

Process mining is concerned with deriving formal models capable of reproducing the behaviour of a given organisational process by analysing observed executions collected in an event log . The elements of an event log are finite sequences (called also traces or words ) of actions. Many effective algorithms have been introduced which issue a control flow model (commonly in Petri net form) aimed at reproducing, as precisely as possible, the language of the considered event log. However, given that identical executions can be observed several times, traces of an event log are associated with a frequency and, hence, an event log inherently yields also a stochastic language . By exploiting the trace frequencies contained in the event log, the stochastic extension of process mining, therefore, consists in deriving stochastic (Petri net) models capable of reproducing the likelihood of the observed executions. In this paper, we introduce a novel stochastic process mining approach. Starting from a non-stochastic Petri net model mined through classical mining algorithms, we employ optimization to identify optimal weights for the transitions of the mined net so that the stochastic language issued by the stochastic interpretation of the mined net closely resembles that of the event log. The optimization is either based on the maximum likelihood principle or on the earth moving distance and we study in detail the characteristics of the associated objective function in both cases. It turns out that the objective function in case of using the maximum likelihood approach lends itself better to optimization. Experiments on some popular real system logs show an improved accuracy with respect to alternative approaches.

Information systems have been widely used to support workflow processes to record the execution of tasks in the process and are stored in so-called “event logs”. Techniques that relate to events extraction have gotten increasing attention such as process mining techniques. Developed process mining methods such as alpha algorithm, alpha++ algorithm, and genetic process mining (GPM) are capable of tackling several structures well, but they are still difficult to discover parallelism structures efficiently since the parallelism structures are too complex. This work presents an evolutionary-based process mining approach based on a hybrid of GPM and particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) in order to handle parallelism structures. The medical records of acute stroke patients of Taiwanese medical institution are used as a practical case to test the proposed approach. Experimental results on the case show the effectiveness of the proposed approach for tackling parallelism structures.

Security is an important issue that every organisation should address. One approach to secure systems could be the use of process mining techniques. Process mining is an emerging discipline which can extract knowledge from event logs that are available in information systems. In the security context, process mining is used to analyse security trails to detect anomalies in process execution. While some of the data mining projects are already implemented in banking, insurance and telecom sector the interesting question is: What is happening in public sector? This paper investigates the research on process mining techniques in security domain and tries to discover the examples of its implementation especially in public sector. The systematic review has been conducted in order to give an overview of state-of-the-art process mining techniques used in security context, to classify the main areas of development, algorithms, tools and to identify possible future research course.

The performance of business processes is a critical success factor for companies on highly competitive markets. The improvement of business processes requires a deep understanding of as-is processes and existing weaknesses that hamper their performance. Traditionally, process mapping and weakness detection are conducted manually based on workshops and interviews with employees involved in the process. Consequently, these practices are not merely time-consuming and costly, but at the same time liable to subjective influences of the interviewed participants. For process mapping, these challenges can be overcome with the data based technology of process mining, that can model as-is-processes based on event log data from companies' information systems. For weakness detection in business processes, however, this technology is not applicable yet since this step requires domain knowledge about process weaknesses, which is not available for processing with process mining. This paper presents an approach to model domain knowledge about weaknesses in business processes to enable their automated and databased detection in event logs with process mining. Thereby, the weakness detection within business process improvement can be conducted more objectively at lower efforts.

Business process mining is a new method that amalgamates business process modelling and analysis with data mining and machine learning techniques, whereby knowledge from event logs stored in today's information system is extracted to automatically construct business process models, identify bottlenecks, and improve the business processes. Since process mining has recently received attention among the research community, there are many challenges. The most important issues have been defined in the process mining manifesto. However, none of the published works investigated, or the defined challenges, have been solved and are still being encountered. Therefore, this paper provides a comprehensive and critical review of the literature in the context of process mining challenges. The contribution of this paper is to increase the maturity of the field of process mining by providing researchers with the state-of-the-art of the most important challenges of process mining.