User-Centered and Privacy-Driven Process Mining System Design for IoT

Significant stochastic dependencies in process models

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.

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.

To solve the problem of modeling cross-organizational business process, a method of mining the cross-organizational businessprocess model from event logs is proposed. The method describes the different aspects of the cross-organizational business processfrom three perspectives: internal perspective, public perspectiveand collaborative perspective, so as to gain the intra-organization-al process model, the inter-organizational public process model, the collaborative process model in cross-organizational collaborat-ion business. The intra-organizational process model formed bymining, analyzing and sorting the running log of the organization involved in cross-organizational collaboration. The inter-organiza-tional process model is obtained by simplifying the intra-organ-izational process model, and finally the cooperative process modelcan be modelled. Compared with the existing modeling methods, this method can protect the details of the internal business proc-ess, and provides the public process model to public only, which can effectively support the individual characteristics of thecross- organizational business process.

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.

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.

The purpose of this research was to examine the effect of Implementation of Accounting Information Systems, Use of Information Systems, The Effectiveness of The Use of Accounting Information Systems, Confidence in the Technology of Accounting Information Systems, and Information Technology towards The Individual Employees Performance. The analysis method used in this research is multiple regression analysis. The sample of this research were the employees who work at Manufacturing Company's Accounting and Finance and using accounting information system. The sample in this research based on nonprobability sampling method, and the sampling technique was convenience sampling. The data used in this research was primary data. The results of this research are: (1) Implementation of Accounting Information Systems has not influence towards The Performance of Individual Employees, (2) Use of Information Systems, The Effectiveness of The Use of Accounting Systems, Confidence In The Technology of Accounting Information Systems, and Information Technology has significant influence towardsThe Performance of Individual Employees, (3) Implementation of Accounting Information Systems, Use of Information Systems, The Effectiveness og The Use of Accounting Information Systems, Confidence in the Technology of Accounting Information Systems, Information Technology simultaneously have significant influence towards Performance of Individual Employees. Key Words: Confidence in the Technology of AIS, Implementation of AIS, Information Technology, Performance, Effectiveness of the Use of Accounting Information System, Use of Information Systems.

Process Mining is a set of techniques that aim at discovering, monitoring and improving real processes by using logs of events created and stored by corporate information systems. The growing use of information and communication technologies and the imminent wide deployment of the Internet of Things enable the massive collection of events, which are going to be studied so as to improve all kinds of systems efficiency. Despite its enormous benefits, analyzing event logs might endanger individuals privacy, especially when those logs contain personal and confidential information, such as healthcare data. This article contributes to an emerging research direction within the process mining field, known as Privacy-Preserving Process Mining (PPPM), which embraces the privacy-by-design principle when conducting process mining analyses. We show that current solutions based on pseudonyms and encryption are vulnerable to attacks based on the analysis of the distribution of events combined with well-known location-oriented attacks such as the restricted space identification and the object identification attacks. With the aim to counteract these attacks, we present u-PPPM, a novel privacy-preserving process mining technique based on the uniformization of events distributions. This approach protects the privacy of the individuals appearing in event logs while minimizing the information loss during process discovery analyses. Experimental results, conducted using six real-life event logs, demonstrate the feasibility of our approach in real settings.

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.

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

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.

Process mining aims at deriving process knowledge from event logs, which contain data recorded during process executions. Typically, event logs need to be generated from process execution data, stored in different kinds of information systems. In complex domains like healthcare, data is available only at different levels of granularity. Event abstraction techniques allow the transformation of events to a common level of granularity, which enables effective process mining. Existing event abstraction techniques do not sufficiently take into account domain knowledge and, as a result, fail to deliver suitable event logs in complex application domains.This paper presents an event abstraction method based on domain ontologies. We show that the method introduced generates semantically meaningful high-level events, suitable for process mining; it is evaluated on real-world patient treatment data of a large U.S. health system.

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

Optimal event log sanitization for privacy-preserving process mining