bpm 2014 - the automated discovery of hybrid processes
DESCRIPTION
Presentation on the automated discovery of Hybrid Processes, given at the 12th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM2014).TRANSCRIPT
The Automated Discovery of Hybrid Processes
Fabrizio M. MaggiUniversity of Tartu
Tijs Slaats*
IT University of Copenhagen
Exformatics
Hajo A. ReijersVU University of
Amsterdam
Overview
• Hybrid Process Models• Discovering Hybrid Process Models• Evaluation• Future Work + Conclusion
Imperative Process Models
Imperative Process Models
• Flow-oriented• Well-suited to rigid processes• In a model with no flow nothing can happen• Adding flow allows for additional possible
behaviors• Common in academia and industry
Declarative Process Models
Declarative Process Models
• Constraint-oriented• Well-suited to flexible processes• In an unconstrained model anything can
happen• Adding constraints limits behavior• Still a novelty in industry
Hybrid Process Models
Hybrid Process Models
• Different parts of the same process may be more or less flexible.• Modeling a flexible process imperatively, or a strict process declaratively, often leads to incomprehensible models.• Mixing of paradigms on the sub-process level:– Pockets of flexibility in workflow services [Sadiq et al.] – Flexibility as a Service (FAAS) [Aalst et al.]
Process Discovery
Event Log Process Model
Process Discovery
• Current discovery techniques:– Mining Petri-nets / Flowcharts
• Alpha miner, Heuristic Miner, ILP miner, …
– Mining Declarative constraints• Declare miner
• But what if the log contains both flexible and rigid parts?– Imperative miners tend to blow-up on flexible logs– Declarative miners will need to find many constraints to model
the strict parts of the process and will often have trouble finding all of them (resulting in processes with low precision)
• Solution: Hybrid Process Discovery!
Hybrid Process Discovery
Context analysis
Clustering (based on
context analysis)
Clustering (association rule
mining)
Standard Process
Discovery
Declare Discovery
String Edit Distance
Evaluation – BPI Challenge 2012Results of Imperative Miners
Evaluation – BPI Challenge 2012Result of Hybrid Miner
Evaluation – BPI Challenge 2012Comparison of Results
Fitness
Size
Future Work
• Proper plugin for Prom.• Visualization of resulting hybrid model.• Further evaluation on real cases.• Further refinement of the heuristics used in
the approach, for example the thresholds used for determining if an event is structured or unstructured.
Conclusion
• We offer the first automated approach for discovering hybrid process models.
• Using the approach on existing logs gives encouraging results: in particular for semi-structured logs the discovered models become more readable.
• Plenty of room for future work in an exciting new angle on process mining.