Beyond Tasks and Gateways:Discovering BPMN Models

with subprocesses, boundary events

and activity markersRaffaele Conforti, Marcello La Rosa

Queensland University of Technology

Marlon Dumas, Luciano García-BañuelosUniversity of Tartu

1BPM’2014 Conference, Eindhoven 11 September 2014

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CID Task Time Stamp …

13219 Enter Loan Application 2007-11-09 T 11:20:10 -

13219 Retrieve Applicant Data 2007-11-09 T 11:22:15 -

13220 Enter Loan Application 2007-11-09 T 11:22:40 -

13219 Compute Installments 2007-11-09 T 11:22:45 -

13219 Notify Eligibility 2007-11-09 T 11:23:00 -

13219 Approve Simple Application 2007-11-09 T 11:24:30 -

13220 Compute Installements 2007-11-09 T 11:24:35 -

… … … …

Automated Process Discovery

What’s the catch?

There you are!

Automated Process Discovery: Handling Complexity

Filter

• Filter out “irrelevant” events (tasks)• Filter out “irrelevant” traces

Abstract

• Zoom into most frequent tasks or paths• Extract subprocesses

Divide

• Divide log by variants based on similarity (trace clustering)• Discover multiple process models rather than one

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Bose, Veerbeck & van det Aalst: Discovering Hierarchical Process Models using ProM

Related Work: ProM two-phase miner

ProM Two-Phase Miner

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Instead of…

Produces this…

Before

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After

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What’s the catch?

Data!

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Extracting the Process Hierarchy

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flat log

log hierarchy

Time POID Att2 Att311-24 17:12

1 … …

11-25 08:53

2 … …

… … … …

ReceivePO

Time MOID POID Att311-24 17:13 1 1 …

11-26 09:31 2 2 …

… 2 … …

CreateMO

ShipPO

Time POID Att211-25 12:11

1 …

… 2 …

… … …

… the rest

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- Heuristics miner- ILP- Inductive Miner- Fodina Heuristics

Evaluation Setup

• Four flat process discovery algos• Heuristics, ILP, Inductive (H), Fodina

• Each algo with and without BPMN-Miner• Quality measures

• Accuracy: Fitness, precision, F-score• Understandability: Size, Control-Flow Complexity, …

Logs Traces Events Event types Events/typeIWT (FRIS) 121 1472 13 113

Insurance 896 12437 9 1382

Order-to-cash 3000 32896 13 2530

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Evaluation - Results

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Side-Effect: Correct Models

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What’s Next• Standalone tool implementation

• Currently in ProM nightly build

• Further evaluation• Logs with larger number of event types

• Noise resilience• Missing events can trick foreign key discovery

• Further enrichment• Event-based gateways, more BPMN events…• Adding data conditions, completion conditions, …

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