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Behavioral process mining for unstructured processes

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Abstract

Real world applications provide many examples of unstructured processes, where process execution is mainly driven by contingent decisions taken by the actors, with the result that the process is rarely repeated exactly in the same way. In these cases, traditional Process Discovery techniques, aimed at extracting complete process models from event logs, reveal some limits. In fact, when applied to logs of unstructured processes, Process Discovery techniques usually return complex, “spaghetti-like” models, which usually provide limited support to analysts. As a remedy, in the present work we propose Behavioral Process Mining as an alternative approach to enlighten relevant subprocesses, representing meaningful collaboration work practices. The approach is based on the application of hierarchical graph clustering to the set of instance graphs generated by a process. We also describe a technique for building instance graphs from traces. We assess advantages and limits of the approach on a set of synthetic and real world experiments.

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Notes

  1. http://bivee.eu

  2. http://www.bpmn.org/

  3. http://www.promtools.org/doku.php?id=prom65

  4. http://ailab.wsu.edu/subdue/

  5. http://cpntools.org/start

  6. The term “ subs ” is hereafter used as an abbreviation of “substructures”

  7. The event log is available at 10.4121/uuid:d9769f3d-0ab0-4fb8-803b-0d1120ffcf54.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, Università Politecnica delle Marche, via Brecce Bianche, 60131, Ancona, Italy

    Claudia Diamantini, Laura Genga & Domenico Potena

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  1. Claudia Diamantini
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  2. Laura Genga
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  3. Domenico Potena
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Correspondence to Laura Genga.

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Diamantini, C., Genga, L. & Potena, D. Behavioral process mining for unstructured processes. J Intell Inf Syst 47, 5–32 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-016-0394-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10844-016-0394-7

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