Mining workflow processes from distributed workflow enactment event logs

Abstract

Workflow management systems help to execute, monitor and manage work process flow and execution. These systems, as they are executing, keep a record of who does what and when (e.g. log of events). The activity of using computer software to examine these records, and deriving various structural data results is called workflow mining. The workflow mining activity, in general, needs to encompass behavioral (process/control-flow), social, informational (data-flow), and organizational perspectives; as well as other perspectives, because workflow systems are "people systems" that must be designed, deployed, and understood within their social and organizational contexts. This paper particularly focuses on mining the behavioral aspect of workflows from XML-based workflow enactment event logs, which are vertically (semantic-driven distribution) or horizontally (syntactic-driven distribution) distributed over the networked workflow enactment components. That is, this paper proposes distributed workflow mining approaches that are able to rediscover ICN-based structured workflow process models through incrementally amalgamating a series of vertically or horizontally fragmented temporal workcases. And each of the approaches consists of a temporal fragment discovery algorithm, which is able to discover a set of temporal fragment models from the fragmented workflow enactment event logs, and a workflow process mining algorithm which rediscovers a structured workflow process model from the discovered temporal fragment models. Where, the temporal fragment model represents the concrete model of the XML-based distributed workflow fragment events log.

https://doi.org/10.34105/j.kmel.2012.04.038