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Exploring Processes and Deviations

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Business Process Management Workshops (BPM 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 202))

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Abstract

In process mining, one of the main challenges is to discover a process model, while balancing several quality criteria. This often requires repeatedly setting parameters, discovering a map and evaluating it, which we refer to as process exploration. Commercial process mining tools like Disco, Perceptive and Celonis are easy to use and have many features, such as log animation, immediate parameter feedback and extensive filtering options, but the resulting maps usually have no executable semantics and due to this, deviations cannot be analysed accurately. Most more academically oriented approaches (e.g., the numerous process discovery approaches supported by ProM) use maps having executable semantics (models), but are often slow, make unrealistic assumptions about the underlying process, or do not provide features like animation and seamless zooming. In this paper, we identify four aspects that are crucial for process exploration: zoomability, evaluation, semantics, and speed. We compare existing commercial tools and academic workflows using these aspects, and introduce a new tool, that aims to combine the best of both worlds. A feature comparison and a case study show that our tool bridges the gap between commercial and academic tools.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://fluxicon.com/disco/; April/May 2014.

  2. 2.

    http://www.celonis.de/en/discover/our-product; April/May 2014.

  3. 3.

    http://www.perceptivesoftware.co.uk/products/perceptive-process/process-mining; fast miner, April/May 2014.

  4. 4.

    Some tools (FM) can also take the eventually-follows relation into account.

  5. 5.

    ‘Local tool’ denotes whether the tool can run on the machine of the user; ‘Representational bias’ refers to the class of models that can be discovered with a tool.

  6. 6.

    Remarks in Table 1: (1) lower bound on fitness (2) vector screenshot export broken; (3) vector screenshot results in embedded bitmap; (4) PM provides a genetic ‘thorough’ miner, but that does not guarantee termination; we excluded it from the comparison; (5) available in a separate plug-in; (6) perfect fitness until a filter is applied; (7) could possibly be achieved by writing PQL queries.

  7. 7.

    The WABO1BB log has been published between submission and acceptance or this paper.

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Acknowledgement

We thank Robin Wolffensperger for his contributions to the positioning of log moves.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Sander J. J. Leemans, Dirk Fahland & Wil M. P. van der Aalst

Authors
  1. Sander J. J. Leemans
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  2. Dirk Fahland
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  3. Wil M. P. van der Aalst
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sander J. J. Leemans .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. IBM Research – Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Fabiana Fournier

  2. Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria

    Jan Mendling

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Leemans, S.J.J., Fahland, D., van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2015). Exploring Processes and Deviations. In: Fournier, F., Mendling, J. (eds) Business Process Management Workshops. BPM 2014. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 202. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15895-2_26

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15895-2_26

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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