scholarly journals Generating Block-Structured Parallel Process Models by Demonstration

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 1876
Author(s):  
Julijana Lekić ◽  
Dragan Milićev ◽  
Dragan Stanković

Programming by demonstration (PBD) is a technique which allows end users to create, modify, accommodate, and expand programs by demonstrating what the program is supposed to do. Although the ideal of common-purpose programming by demonstration or by examples has been rejected as practically unrealistic, this approach has found its application and shown potentials when limited to specific narrow domains and ranges of applications. In this paper, the original method of applying the principles of programming by demonstration in the area of process mining (PM) to interactive construction of block-structured parallel business processes models is presented. A technique and tool that enable interactive process mining and incremental discovery of process models have been described in this paper. The idea is based on the following principle: using a demonstrational user interface, a user demonstrates scenarios of execution of parallel business process activities, and the system gives a generalized model process specification. A modified process mining technique with the α|| algorithm applied on weakly complete event logs is used for creating parallel business process models using demonstration.

Author(s):  
Bruna Brandão ◽  
Flávia Santoro ◽  
Leonardo Azevedo

In business process models, elements can be scattered (repeated) within different processes, making it difficult to handle changes, analyze process for improvements, or check crosscutting impacts. These scattered elements are named as Aspects. Similar to the aspect-oriented paradigm in programming languages, in BPM, aspect handling has the goal to modularize the crosscutting concerns spread across the models. This process modularization facilitates the management of the process (reuse, maintenance and understanding). The current approaches for aspect identification are made manually; thus, resulting in the problem of subjectivity and lack of systematization. This paper proposes a method to automatically identify aspects in business process from its event logs. The method is based on mining techniques and it aims to solve the problem of the subjectivity identification made by specialists. The initial results from a preliminary evaluation showed evidences that the method identified correctly the aspects present in the process model.


2016 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julijana Lekić ◽  
Dragan Milićev

Abstract α-algorithm is suitable to discover a large class of workflow (WF) nets based on the behaviour recorded in event logs, with the main limiting assumption that the event log is complete. Our research has been aimed at finding ways of discovering business process models based on examples of traces, ie, logs of workflow actions that do not meet the requirement of completeness. In this aim, we have modified the existing and introduced a new relation between activities recorded in the event log, which has led to a partial correction of the process models discovering technique, including the α-algorithm. We have also introduced the notion of causally complete logs, from which our modified algorithm can produce the same result as the α-algorithm from complete logs. The effect of these modifications on the efficiency of the process model discovering is mostly evident for business processes in which many activities can be performed in parallel. The application of the modified method for discovering block-structured models of parallel business processes is presented in this paper.


Author(s):  
Alessandro Marchetto ◽  
Chiara Di Francescomarino

Web Applications (WAs) have been often used to expose business processes to the users. WA modernization and evolution are complex and time-consuming activities that can be supported by software documentation (e.g., process models). When, as often happens, documentation is missing or is incomplete, documentation recovery and mining represent an important opportunity for reconstructing or completing it. Existing process-mining approaches, however, tend to recover models that are quite complex, rich, and intricate, thus difficult to understand and use for analysts and developers. Model refinement approaches have been presented in the literature to reduce the model complexity and intricateness while preserving the capability of representing the relevant information. In this chapter, the authors summarize approaches to mine first and refine later business process models from existing WAs. In particular, they present two process model refinement approaches: (1) re-modularization and (2) reduction. The authors introduce the techniques and show how to apply them to WAs.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
Zineb Lamghari ◽  
Maryam Radgui ◽  
Rajaa Saidi ◽  
Moulay Driss Rahmani

The refined process mining framework contains a set of activities that use extracted information from event logs, discovered models and normative ones. Among these activities, we find those dealing with running events in a Structured Business Process (SBP) context, which are the Detect, the Predict and the Recommend activities. These three activities are nominated as an operational support system that aims at detecting deviations, predicting events and recommending actions. In this regard, operational support systems perform well on SBP while, it stills a challenging task for an Unstructured Business Process (UBP). This puts forward the difficulty of predicting events and recommending actions for UBP, because of its complex structure. In this context, simplification and structuring operations must be applied. Therefore, the intervention of other process mining activities is required for business process simplification and structuring. To this end, we present an operational support approach dealing with UBP, using the refined process mining framework activities.


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


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 35-40
Author(s):  
Serhii Chalyi ◽  
Ievgen Bogatov

The problem of constructing an attribute description of a business process with the automated formation of process models “as is” using logs of information systems in which the tracks of individual processes are not identified is considered. It is shown that to solve this problem, it is advisable to distinguish the distinctive properties of individual business processes represented by the attributes of log events. A method for constructing an attribute description of a business process is proposed. The method is based on the comparison of combinations of attributes for intervals of events of a fixed length and the subsequent selection of subsets of attributes with the same values. The method includes the steps of forming the intervals of events, constructing combinations of attributes for specified intervals, as well as calculating and subsequently averaging the weights of combinations of attributes on these intervals. The result of the method is a weight-ordered set of event attributes and their values, which takes into account the attribute and temporal aspects of the business process. The method creates conditions for a more efficient transition from functional to process management based on splitting the log into processes using the resulting attribute description and subsequent prototyping of business process models “as is” by means of process mining.


Process models are the analytical illustration of an organization’s activity. They are very primordial to map out the current business process of an organization, build a baseline of process enhancement and construct future processes where the enhancements are incorporated. To achieve this, in the field of process mining, algorithms have been proposed to build process models using the information recorded in the event logs. However, for complex process configurations, these algorithms cannot correctly build complex process structures. These structures are invisible tasks, non-free choice constructs, and short loops. The ability of each discovery algorithm in discovering the process constructs is different. In this work, we propose a framework responsible of detecting from event logs the complex constructs existing in the data. By identifying the existing constructs, one can choose the process discovery techniques suitable for the event data in question. The proposed framework has been implemented in ProM as a plugin. The evaluation results demonstrate that the constructs can correctly be identified.


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.


Author(s):  
Alessandro Marchetto ◽  
Chiara Di Francescomarino

Web Applications (WAs) have been often used to expose business processes to the users. WA modernization and evolution are complex and time-consuming activities that can be supported by software documentation (e.g., process models). When, as often happens, documentation is missing or is incomplete, documentation recovery and mining represent an important opportunity for reconstructing or completing it. Existing process-mining approaches, however, tend to recover models that are quite complex, rich, and intricate, thus difficult to understand and use for analysts and developers. Model refinement approaches have been presented in the literature to reduce the model complexity and intricateness while preserving the capability of representing the relevant information. In this chapter, the authors summarize approaches to mine first and refine later business process models from existing WAs. In particular, they present two process model refinement approaches: (1) re-modularization and (2) reduction. The authors introduce the techniques and show how to apply them to WAs.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (22) ◽  
pp. 10556
Author(s):  
Heidy M. Marin-Castro ◽  
Edgar Tello-Leal

Process Mining allows organizations to obtain actual business process models from event logs (discovery), to compare the event log or the resulting process model in the discovery task with the existing reference model of the same process (conformance), and to detect issues in the executed process to improve (enhancement). An essential element in the three tasks of process mining (discovery, conformance, and enhancement) is data cleaning, used to reduce the complexity inherent to real-world event data, to be easily interpreted, manipulated, and processed in process mining tasks. Thus, new techniques and algorithms for event data preprocessing have been of interest in the research community in business process. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review and provide, for the first time, a survey of relevant approaches of event data preprocessing for business process mining tasks. The aim of this work is to construct a categorization of techniques or methods related to event data preprocessing and to identify relevant challenges around these techniques. We present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the most popular techniques for event log preprocessing. We also study and present findings about how a preprocessing technique can improve a process mining task. We also discuss the emerging future challenges in the domain of data preprocessing, in the context of process mining. The results of this study reveal that the preprocessing techniques in process mining have demonstrated a high impact on the performance of the process mining tasks. The data cleaning requirements are dependent on the characteristics of the event logs (voluminous, a high variability in the set of traces size, changes in the duration of the activities. In this scenario, most of the surveyed works use more than a single preprocessing technique to improve the quality of the event log. Trace-clustering and trace/event level filtering resulted in being the most commonly used preprocessing techniques due to easy of implementation, and they adequately manage noise and incompleteness in the event logs.


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