Process mining in software systems: Discovering real-life business transactions and process models from distributed systems

Author(s):  
Maikel Leemans ◽  
Wil M. P. van der Aalst
Author(s):  
Yaghoub Rashnavadi ◽  
Sina Behzadifard ◽  
Reza Farzadnia ◽  
Sina Zamani

Communication is indispensable for today's lifestyle, and thanks to technology, millions of people can communicate as quickly as possible. The effect of this breakthrough has transformed organizations to the degree that they generate billions of emails daily to facilitate their operations. There is implicit information behind this vast corpus of human-generated content that can be mined and used for their benefit. This paper tries to address the opportunity that email logs can bring to organizations and propose an approach to discover process models by combining supervised text classification and process mining. This framework consists of two main steps, text classification, and process mining. First, Emails will be classified with supervised machine learning, and to mine, the processes fuzzy Miner is used. To further investigate the application of this framework, we also applied this framework over a real-life dataset from a case study organization.


Author(s):  
Yutika Amelia Effendi ◽  
Nania Nuzulita

Background: Nowadays, enterprise computing manages business processes which has grown up rapidly. This situation triggers the production of a massive event log. One type of event log is double timestamp event log. The double timestamp has a start time and complete time of each activity executed in the business process. It also has a close relationship with temporal causal relation. The temporal causal relation is a pattern of event log that occurs from each activity performed in the process.Objective: In this paper, seven types of temporal causal relation between activities were presented as an extended version of relations used in the double timestamp event log. Since the event log was not always executed sequentially, therefore using temporal causal relation, the event log was divided into several small groups to determine the relations of activities and to mine the business process.Methods: In these experiments, the temporal causal relation based on time interval which were presented in Gantt chart also determined whether each case could be classified as sequential or parallel relations. Then to obtain the business process, each temporal causal relation was combined into one business process based on the timestamp of activity in the event log.Results: The experimental results, which were implemented in two real-life event logs, showed that using temporal causal relation and double timestamp event log could discover business process models.Conclusion: Considering the findings, this study concludes that business process models and their sequential and parallel AND, OR, XOR relations can be discovered by using temporal causal relation and double timestamp event log.Keywords:Business Process, Process Discovery, Process Mining, Temporal Causal Relation, Double Timestamp Event Log


2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (01) ◽  
pp. 1550001 ◽  
Author(s):  
Viara Popova ◽  
Dirk Fahland ◽  
Marlon Dumas

Artifact-centric modeling is an approach for capturing business processes in terms of so-called business artifacts — key entities driving a company's operations and whose lifecycles and interactions define an overall business process. This approach has been shown to be especially suitable in the context of processes where one-to-many or many-to-many relations exist between the entities involved in the process. As a contribution towards building up a body of methods to support artifact-centric modeling, this article presents a method for automated discovery of artifact-centric process models starting from logs consisting of flat collections of event records. We decompose the problem in such a way that a wide range of existing (non-artifact-centric) automated process discovery methods can be reused in a flexible manner. The presented methods are implemented as a package for ProM, a generic open-source framework for process mining. The methods have been applied to reverse-engineer an artifact-centric process model starting from logs of a real-life business process.


2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (02) ◽  
pp. 1850014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Luca Bernardi ◽  
Marta Cimitile ◽  
Francesco Mercaldo

Cloud computing market is continually growing in the last years and becoming a new opportunity for business for private and public organisations. The diffusion of multi-tenants distributed systems accessible by clouds leads to the birth of some cross-organisational environments, increasing the organisation efficiency, promoting the business dynamism and reducing the costs. In spite of these advantages, this new business model drives the interest of researchers and practitioners through new critical issues. First of all, the multi-tenant distributed systems need new techniques to improve the traditional resource management distribution along the different tenants. Secondly, new approaches to the process analysis and monitoring analysed since cross-organisational environments allow various organisations to execute the same process in different variants. Hence, information about how each process variant characterised can be collected by the system and stored as process logs. The usefulness of such logs is twofold: these logs can be analysed using some process mining techniques to understand and improve the business processes and can be used to find better resource management and scalability. This paper proposes a cloud computing multi-tenancy architecture to support cross-organisational process executions and improve resource management distribution. Moreover, the approach supports the systematic extraction/composition of distributed data from the system event logs that are assumed to carry information of each process variant. To this aim, the approach also integrates an online process mining technique for the runtime extraction of business rules from event logs. Declarative processes are used to represent process variants running on the analysed infrastructure as they are particularly suited to represent the business process in a context characterised by low predictability and high variability. In this work, we also present a case study where the proposed architecture is implemented and applied to the execution of a real-life process of online products selling.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 995-1019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Kalenkova ◽  
Andrea Burattin ◽  
Massimiliano de Leoni ◽  
Wil van der Aalst ◽  
Alessandro Sperduti

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that process mining techniques can help to discover process models from event logs, using conventional high-level process modeling languages, such as Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), leveraging their representational bias. Design/methodology/approach The integrated discovery approach presented in this work is aimed to mine: control, data and resource perspectives within one process diagram, and, if possible, construct a hierarchy of subprocesses improving the model readability. The proposed approach is defined as a sequence of steps, performed to discover a model, containing various perspectives and presenting a holistic view of a process. This approach was implemented within an open-source process mining framework called ProM and proved its applicability for the analysis of real-life event logs. Findings This paper shows that the proposed integrated approach can be applied to real-life event logs of information systems from different domains. The multi-perspective process diagrams obtained within the approach are of good quality and better than models discovered using a technique that does not consider hierarchy. Moreover, due to the decomposition methods applied, the proposed approach can deal with large event logs, which cannot be handled by methods that do not use decomposition. Originality/value The paper consolidates various process mining techniques, which were never integrated before and presents a novel approach for the discovery of multi-perspective hierarchical BPMN models. This approach bridges the gap between well-known process mining techniques and a wide range of BPMN-complaint tools.


Information ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Sturm ◽  
Myriel Fichtner ◽  
Stefan Schönig

Declarative process management has emerged as an alternative solution for describing flexible workflows. In turn, the modelling opportunities with languages such as Declare are less intuitive and hard to implement. The area of process discovery covers the automatic discovery of process models. It has been shown that the performance of process mining algorithms, particularly when considering the multi-perspective declarative process models, are not satisfactory. State-of-the-art mining tools do not support multi-perspective declarative models at this moment. We address this open research problem by proposing an efficient mining framework that leverages the latest big data analysis technology and builds upon the distributed processing method MapReduce. The paper at hand further completes the research on multi-perspective declarative process mining by extending our previous work in various ways; in particular, we introduce algorithms and descriptions for the full set of commonly accepted types of MP-Declare constraints. Additionally, we provide a novel implementation concept allowing an easy introduction and discovery of customised constraint templates. We evaluated the mining performance and effectiveness of the presented approach on several real-life event logs. The results highlight that, with our efficient mining technique, multi-perspective declarative process models can be extracted in reasonable time.


Author(s):  
Daniel Lübke ◽  
Maike Ahrens ◽  
Kurt Schneider

AbstractBusiness process modeling is an important activity for developing software systems—especially within digitization projects and when realizing digital business models. Specifying requirements and building executable workflows is often done by using BPMN 2.0 process models. Although there are several style guides available for BPMN, e.g., by Silver and Richard (BPMN method and style, vol 2, Cody-Cassidy Press, Aptos, 2009), there has not been much empirical research done into the consequences of the diagram layout. In particular, layouts that require scrolling have not been investigated yet. The aim of this research is to establish layout guidelines for business process modeling that help business process modelers to create more understandable business process diagrams. For establishing benefits and penalties of different layouts, a controlled eye tracking experiment was conducted, in which data of 21 professional software developers was used. Our results show that horizontal layouts are less demanding and that as many diagram elements as possible should be put on the initially visible screen area because such diagram elements are viewed more often and longer. Additionally, diagram elements related to the reader’s task are read more often than those not relevant to the task. BPMN modelers should favor a horizontal layout and use a more complex snake or multi-line layout whenever the diagrams are too large to fit on one page in order to support BPMN model comprehension.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Cong Liu ◽  
Huiling Li ◽  
Qingtian Zeng ◽  
Ting Lu ◽  
Caihong Li

To support effective emergency disposal, organizations need to collaborate with each other to complete the emergency mission that cannot be handled by a single organization. In general, emergency disposal that involves multiple organizations is typically organized as a group of interactive processes, known as cross-organization emergency response processes (CERPs). The construction of CERPs is a time-consuming and error-prone task that requires practitioners to have extensive experience and business background. Process mining aims to construct process models by analyzing event logs. However, existing process mining techniques cannot be applied directly to discover CERPs since we have to consider the complexity of various collaborations among different organizations, e.g., message exchange and resource sharing patterns. To tackle this challenge, a CERP model mining method is proposed in this paper. More specifically, we first extend classical Petri nets with resource and message attributes, known as resource and message aware Petri nets (RMPNs). Then, intra-organization emergency response process (IERP) models that are represented as RMPNs are discovered from emergency drilling event logs. Next, collaboration patterns among emergency organizations are formally defined and discovered. Finally, CERP models are obtained by merging IERP models and collaboration patterns. Through comparative experimental evaluation using the fire emergency drilling event log, we illustrate that the proposed approach facilitates the discovery of high-quality CERP models than existing state-of-the-art approaches.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4.12) ◽  
pp. 52
Author(s):  
Mohit Arora ◽  
Dr. Sahil Verma ◽  
Dr. Kavita

Software Process Models from its inception instill standardization and creates a generic culture of developing software for various IT industries. A great paradigm shift has been observed in terms of embracing Agile Development methodology as a viable development methodology in cross key business units. There is a buffet of agile methodologies comes under the umbrella of ASD, out of which Scrum got the highest popularity and acceptability index.  Agile based software development is the need of immediate environment. There is an increasing demand for significant changes to software systems to meet ever-changing user requirements and specifications. As Agile is volatile, so effort estimation is challenging and still striving for perfection to decide size, effort, cost, duration and schedule of projects with minimum error. This cause sensitizes potential researchers all across the globe to start working on addressing the issue of inaccurate predication of efforts. The gap between estimated and actual effort is because of limited or no inclusion of various estimation factors like people and project related factors, inappropriate use of size metric and cost drivers, ignorance of testing effort, team member’s inability to understand user story size and complexity etc. This paper attempts to bridge the gap of estimated and actual effort by the use of soft computing techniques thus taking the research to advance frontier area in terms of estimation. 


2017 ◽  
Vol 01 (01) ◽  
pp. 1630004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asef Pourmasoumi ◽  
Ebrahim Bagheri

One of the most valuable assets of an organization is its organizational data. The analysis and mining of this potential hidden treasure can lead to much added-value for the organization. Process mining is an emerging area that can be useful in helping organizations understand the status quo, check for compliance and plan for improving their processes. The aim of process mining is to extract knowledge from event logs of today’s organizational information systems. Process mining includes three main types: discovering process models from event logs, conformance checking and organizational mining. In this paper, we briefly introduce process mining and review some of its most important techniques. Also, we investigate some of the applications of process mining in industry and present some of the most important challenges that are faced in this area.


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