scholarly journals Detecting Complex Control-Flow Constructs for Choosing Process Discovery Techniques

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.

2021 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Zineb Lamghari

Process discovery technique aims at automatically generating a process model that accurately describes a Business Process (BP) based on event data. Related discovery algorithms consider recorded events are only resulting from an operational BP type. While the management community defines three BP types, which are: Management, Support and Operational. They distinguish each BP type by different proprieties like the main business process objective as domain knowledge. This puts forward the lack of process discovery technique in obtaining process models according to business process types (Management and Support). In this paper, we demonstrate that business process types can guide the process discovery technique in generating process models. A special interest is given to the use of process mining to deal with this challenge.


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.


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.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 2446
Author(s):  
Muktikanta Sahu ◽  
Rupjit Chakraborty ◽  
Gopal Krishna Nayak

Building process models from the available data in the event logs is the primary objective of Process discovery. Alpha algorithm is one of the popular algorithms accessible for ascertaining a process model from the event logs in process mining. The steps involved in the Alpha algorithm are computationally rigorous and this problem further manifolds with the exponentially increasing event log data. In this work, we have exploited task parallelism in the Alpha algorithm for process discovery by using MPI programming model. The proposed work is based on distributed memory parallelism available in MPI programming for performance improvement. Independent and computationally intensive steps in the Alpha algorithm are identified and task parallelism is exploited. The execution time of serial as well as parallel implementation of Alpha algorithm are measured and used for calculating the extent of speedup achieved. The maximum and minimum speedups obtained are 3.97x and 3.88x respectively with an average speedup of 3.94x.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Weidong Zhao ◽  
Xi Liu ◽  
Weihui Dai

Process mining is automated acquisition of process models from event logs. Although many process mining techniques have been developed, most of them are based on control flow. Meanwhile, the existing role-oriented process mining methods focus on correctness and integrity of roles while ignoring role complexity of the process model, which directly impacts understandability and quality of the model. To address these problems, we propose a genetic programming approach to mine the simplified process model. Using a new metric of process complexity in terms of roles as the fitness function, we can find simpler process models. The new role complexity metric of process models is designed from role cohesion and coupling, and applied to discover roles in process models. Moreover, the higher fitness derived from role complexity metric also provides a guideline for redesigning process models. Finally, we conduct case study and experiments to show that the proposed method is more effective for streamlining the process by comparing with related studies.


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):  
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


2022 ◽  
Vol 183 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 293-317
Author(s):  
Anna Kalenkova ◽  
Josep Carmona ◽  
Artem Polyvyanyy ◽  
Marcello La Rosa

State-of-the-art process discovery methods construct free-choice process models from event logs. Consequently, the constructed models do not take into account indirect dependencies between events. Whenever the input behaviour is not free-choice, these methods fail to provide a precise model. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for enhancing free-choice process models by adding non-free-choice constructs discovered a-posteriori via region-based techniques. This allows us to benefit from the performance of existing process discovery methods and the accuracy of the employed fundamental synthesis techniques. We prove that the proposed approach preserves fitness with respect to the event log while improving the precision when indirect dependencies exist. The approach has been implemented and tested on both synthetic and real-life datasets. The results show its effectiveness in repairing models discovered from event logs.


Automated Business Process Discovery is a rising field that depends vigorously on computer software. Software do the automatic analysis of the several documents such as audits and event logs and generate useful,novel,hidden and fascinating information from that. The information produce from the software recognize the process model as well as investigates varieties and gives clients a vastly improved picture of what a particular business process resembles, and how changes would influence the business in general. This paper presents the common framework activities of process mining in the context to all well known software. The paper also describes the open source process mining software with their operational characteristics. Finally, paper represents the role of process mining software for various famous industries.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (09) ◽  
pp. 116-121
Author(s):  
Huiling LI ◽  
Shuaipeng ZHANG ◽  
Xuan SU

The information system collects a large number of business process event logs, and process discovery aims to discover process models from the event logs. Many process discovery methods have been proposed, but most of them still have problems when processing event logs, such as low mining efficiency and poor process model quality. The trace clustering method allows to decompose original log to effectively solve these problems. There are many existing trace clustering methods, such as clustering based on vector space approaches, context-aware trace clustering, model-based sequence clustering, etc. The clustering effects obtained by different trace clustering methods are often different. Therefore, this paper proposes a preprocessing method to improve the performance of process discovery, called as trace clustering. Firstly, the event log is decomposed into a set of sub-logs by trace clustering method, Secondly, the sub-logs generate process models respectively by the process mining method. The experimental analysis on the datasets shows that the method proposed not only effectively improves the time performance of process discovery, but also improves the quality of the process model.


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