Process discovery is the problem of, given a log of observed behaviour, finding a process model that 'best' describes this behaviour. A large variety of process discovery algorithms has been proposed. However, no existing algorithm guarantees to return a fitting model (i.e., able to reproduce all observed behaviour) that is sound (free of deadlocks and other anomalies) in finite time. We present an extensible framework to discover from any given log a set of block-structured process models that are sound and fit the observed behaviour. In addition we characterise the minimal information required in the log to rediscover a particular process model. We then provide a polynomial-time algorithm for discovering a sound, fitting, block-structured model from any given log; we give sufficient conditions on the log for which our algorithm returns a model that is languageequivalent to the process model underlying the log, including unseen behaviour. The technique is implemented in a prototypical tool.

No abstract

No abstract

Considerable amounts of data, including process events, are collected and stored by organisations nowadays. Discovering a process model from such event data and verification of the quality of discovered models are important steps in process mining. Many discovery techniques have been proposed, but none of them combines scalability with strong quality guarantees. We would like such techniques to handle billions of events or thousands of activities, to produce sound models (without deadlocks and other anomalies), and to guarantee that the underlying process can be rediscovered when sufficient information is available. In this paper, we introduce a framework for process discovery that ensures these properties while passing over the log only once and introduce three algorithms using the framework. To measure the quality of discovered models for such large logs, we introduce a model–model and model–log comparison framework that applies a divide-and-conquer strategy to measure recall, fitness, and precision. We experimentally show that these discovery and measuring techniques sacrifice little compared to other algorithms, while gaining the ability to cope with event logs of 100,000,000 traces and processes of 10,000 activities on a standard computer.

Process mining aims to transform event data recorded in information systems into knowledge of an organisation's business processes. The results of process mining analysis can be used to improve process performance or compliance to rules and regulations. However, applying process mining in practice is not trivial. In this paper we introduce PM 2 , a methodology to guide the execution of process mining projects. We successfully applied PM 2 during a case study within IBM, a multinational technology corporation, where we identified potential process improvements for one of their purchasing processes.