arXiv subjects

Alessandro Berti

Publications and source records attributed to Alessandro Berti.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

OCEL (Object-Centric Event Log) 2.0 Specification

Object-Centric Event Logs (OCELs) form the basis for Object-Centric Process Mining (OCPM). OCEL 1.0 was first released in 2020 and triggered the development of a range of OCPM techniques. OCEL 2.0 forms the new, more expressive standard, allowing for more extensive process analyses while remaining in an easily exchangeable format. In contrast to the first OCEL standard, it can depict changes in objects, provide information on object relationships, and qualify these relationships to other objects or specific events. Compared to XES, it is more expressive, less complicated, and better readable. OCEL 2.0 offers three exchange formats: a relational database (SQLite), XML, and JSON format. This OCEL 2.0 specification document provides an introduction to the standard, its metamodel, and its exchange formats, aimed at practitioners and researchers alike.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

OCEL 2.0 Resources -- www.ocel-standard.org

Process mining has become a cornerstone of process analysis and improvement over the last few years. With the widespread adoption of process mining tools and libraries, the limitations of traditional process mining to deal with event data with multiple case identifiers, i.e., object-centric event data, have become apparent. As a response, the subfield of object-centric process mining has formed, including a file format standardization attempt in the form of OCEL 1.0, unifying the insights of previous developments in capturing object-centric event data. However, discussions among researchers and practitioners have shown that the proposed OCEL 1.0 standard does not go far enough. OCEL 2.0 has been proposed as an advanced refinement, including normative and explicit object-to-object relationships, qualifiers for object-to-object and event-to-object relationships, and evolving object attribute values. This demonstration presents the OCEL 2.0 website available under the URL https://www.ocel-standard.org as a one-stop shop for the detailed specification, example event logs, and broad tool support to facilitate the adoption of the format.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

Quantum Subroutine for Variance Estimation: Algorithmic Design and Applications

Quantum computing sets the foundation for new ways of designing algorithms, thanks to the peculiar properties inherited by quantum mechanics. The exploration of this new paradigm faces new challenges concerning which field quantum speedup can be achieved. Towards finding solutions, looking for the design of quantum subroutines that are more efficient than their classical counterpart poses solid pillars to new powerful quantum algorithms. Herewith, we delve into a grounding subroutine, the computation of the variance, whose usefulness spaces across different fields of application, particularly the Artificial Intelligence (AI) one. Indeed, the finding of the quantum counterpart of these building blocks impacts vertically those algorithms that leverage this metric. In this work, we propose QVAR, a quantum subroutine, to compute the variance that exhibits a logarithmic complexity both in the circuit depth and width, excluding the state preparation cost. With the vision of showing the use of QVAR as a subroutine for new quantum algorithms, we tackle two tasks from the AI domain: Feature Selection and Outlier Detection. In particular, we showcase two AI hybrid quantum algorithms that leverage QVAR: the Hybrid Quantum Feature Selection (HQFS) algorithm and the Quantum Outlier Detection Algorithm (QODA). In this manuscript, we describe the implementation of QVAR, HQFS, and QODA, providing their correctness and complexities and showing the effectiveness of these hybrid quantum algorithms with respect to their classical counterpart.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2023

Advancements and Challenges in Object-Centric Process Mining: A Systematic Literature Review

Recent years have seen the emergence of object-centric process mining techniques. Born as a response to the limitations of traditional process mining in analyzing event data from prevalent information systems like CRM and ERP, these techniques aim to tackle the deficiency, convergence, and divergence issues seen in traditional event logs. Despite the promise, the adoption in real-world process mining analyses remains limited. This paper embarks on a comprehensive literature review of object-centric process mining, providing insights into the current status of the discipline and its historical trajectory.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2023

Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) for Process Mining (Technical Report)

This technical report describes the intersection of process mining and large language models (LLMs), specifically focusing on the abstraction of traditional and object-centric process mining artifacts into textual format. We introduce and explore various prompting strategies: direct answering, where the large language model directly addresses user queries; multi-prompt answering, which allows the model to incrementally build on the knowledge obtained through a series of prompts; and the generation of database queries, facilitating the validation of hypotheses against the original event log. Our assessment considers two large language models, GPT-4 and Google's Bard, under various contextual scenarios across all prompting strategies. Results indicate that these models exhibit a robust understanding of key process mining abstractions, with notable proficiency in interpreting both declarative and procedural process models. In addition, we find that both models demonstrate strong performance in the object-centric setting, which could significantly propel the advancement of the object-centric process mining discipline. Additionally, these models display a noteworthy capacity to evaluate various concepts of fairness in process mining. This opens the door to more rapid and efficient assessments of the fairness of process mining event logs, which has significant implications for the field. The integration of these large language models into process mining applications may open new avenues for exploration, innovation, and insight generation in the field.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2023

Abstractions, Scenarios, and Prompt Definitions for Process Mining with LLMs: A Case Study

Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of answering questions in natural language for various purposes. With recent advancements (such as GPT-4), LLMs perform at a level comparable to humans for many proficient tasks. The analysis of business processes could benefit from a natural process querying language and using the domain knowledge on which LLMs have been trained. However, it is impossible to provide a complete database or event log as an input prompt due to size constraints. In this paper, we apply LLMs in the context of process mining by i) abstracting the information of standard process mining artifacts and ii) describing the prompting strategies. We implement the proposed abstraction techniques into pm4py, an open-source process mining library. We present a case study using available event logs. Starting from different abstractions and analysis questions, we formulate prompts and evaluate the quality of the answers.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2023

A Collection of Simulated Event Logs for Fairness Assessment in Process Mining

The analysis of fairness in process mining is a significant aspect of data-driven decision-making, yet the advancement in this field is constrained due to the scarcity of event data that incorporates fairness considerations. To bridge this gap, we present a collection of simulated event logs, spanning four critical domains, which encapsulate a variety of discrimination scenarios. By simulating these event logs with CPN Tools, we ensure data with known ground truth, thereby offering a robust foundation for fairness analysis. These logs are made freely available under the CC-BY-4.0 license and adhere to the XES standard, thereby assuring broad compatibility with various process mining tools. This initiative aims to empower researchers with the requisite resources to test and develop fairness techniques within process mining, ultimately contributing to the pursuit of equitable, data-driven decision-making processes.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2022

Quantum Clustering with k-Means: a Hybrid Approach

Quantum computing is a promising paradigm based on quantum theory for performing fast computations. Quantum algorithms are expected to surpass their classical counterparts in terms of computational complexity for certain tasks, including machine learning. In this paper, we design, implement, and evaluate three hybrid quantum k-Means algorithms, exploiting different degree of parallelism. Indeed, each algorithm incrementally leverages quantum parallelism to reduce the complexity of the cluster assignment step up to a constant cost. In particular, we exploit quantum phenomena to speed up the computation of distances. The core idea is that the computation of distances between records and centroids can be executed simultaneously, thus saving time, especially for big datasets. We show that our hybrid quantum k-Means algorithms can be more efficient than the classical version, still obtaining comparable clustering results.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2022

Interactive Process Identification and Selection from SAP ERP

SAP ERP is one of the most popular information systems supporting various organizational processes, e.g., O2C and P2P. However, the amount of processes and data contained in SAP ERP is enormous. Thus, the identification of the processes that are contained in a specific SAP instance, and the creation of a list of related tables is a significant challenge. Eventually, one needs to extract an event log for process mining purposes from SAP ERP. This demo paper shows the tool Interactive SAP Explorer that tackles the process identification and selection problem by encoding the relational structure of SAP ERP in a labeled property graph. Our approach allows asking complex process-related queries along with advanced representations of the relational structure.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2022

OC-PM: Analyzing Object-Centric Event Logs and Process Models

Object-centric process mining is a novel branch of process mining that aims to analyze event data from mainstream information systems (such as SAP) more naturally, without being forced to form mutually exclusive groups of events with the specification of a case notion. The development of object-centric process mining is related to exploiting object-centric event logs, which includes exploring and filtering the behavior contained in the logs and constructing process models which can encode the behavior of different classes of objects and their interactions (which can be discovered from object-centric event logs). This paper aims to provide a broad look at the exploration and processing of object-centric event logs to discover information related to the lifecycle of the different objects composing the event log. Also, comprehensive tool support (OC-PM) implementing the proposed techniques is described in the paper.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2022

Filtering and Sampling Object-Centric Event Logs

The scalability of process mining techniques is one of the main challenges to tackling the massive amount of event data produced every day in enterprise information systems. To this purpose, filtering and sampling techniques are proposed to keep a subset of the behavior of the original log and make the application of process mining techniques feasible. While techniques for filtering/sampling traditional event logs have been already proposed, filtering/sampling object-centric event logs is more challenging as the number of factors (events, objects, object types) to consider is significantly higher. This paper provides some techniques to filter/sample object-centric event logs.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2022

PM4Py-GPU: a High-Performance General-Purpose Library for Process Mining

Open-source process mining provides many algorithms for the analysis of event data which could be used to analyze mainstream processes (e.g., O2C, P2P, CRM). However, compared to commercial tools, they lack the performance and struggle to analyze large amounts of data. This paper presents PM4Py-GPU, a Python process mining library based on the NVIDIA RAPIDS framework. Thanks to the dataframe columnar storage and the high level of parallelism, a significant speed-up is achieved on classic process mining computations and processing activities.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2022

A Scalable Database for the Storage of Object-Centric Event Logs

Object-centric process mining provides a set of techniques for the analysis of event data where events are associated to several objects. To store Object-centric Event Logs (OCELs), the JSON-OCEL and JSON-XML formats have been recently proposed. However, the proposed implementations of the OCEL are file-based. This means that the entire file needs to be parsed in order to apply process mining techniques, such as the discovery of object-centric process models. In this paper, we propose a database storage for the OCEL format using the MongoDB document database. Since documents in MongoDB are equivalent to JSON objects, the current JSON implementation of the standard could be translated straightforwardly in a series of MongoDB collections.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2021

An Event Data Extraction Approach from SAP ERP for Process Mining

The extraction, transformation, and loading of event logs from information systems is the first and the most expensive step in process mining. In particular, extracting event logs from popular ERP systems such as SAP poses major challenges, given the size and the structure of the data. Open-source support for ETL is scarce, while commercial process mining vendors maintain connectors to ERP systems supporting ETL of a limited number of business processes in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we propose an approach to facilitate event data extraction from SAP ERP systems. In the proposed approach, we store event data in the format of object-centric event logs that efficiently describe executions of business processes supported by ERP systems. To evaluate the feasibility of the proposed approach, we have developed a tool implementing it and conducted case studies with a real-life SAP ERP system.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2021

Process Comparison Using Object-Centric Process Cubes

Process mining provides ways to analyze business processes. Common process mining techniques consider the process as a whole. However, in real-life business processes, different behaviors exist that make the overall process too complex to interpret. Process comparison is a branch of process mining that isolates different behaviors of the process from each other by using process cubes. Process cubes organize event data using different dimensions. Each cell contains a set of events that can be used as an input to apply process mining techniques. Existing work on process cubes assume single case notions. However, in real processes, several case notions (e.g., order, item, package, etc.) are intertwined. Object-centric process mining is a new branch of process mining addressing multiple case notions in a process. To make a bridge between object-centric process mining and process comparison, we propose a process cube framework, which supports process cube operations such as slice and dice on object-centric event logs. To facilitate the comparison, the framework is integrated with several object-centric process discovery approaches.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2020

Discovering Object-Centric Petri Nets

Techniques to discover Petri nets from event data assume precisely one case identifier per event. These case identifiers are used to correlate events, and the resulting discovered Petri net aims to describe the life-cycle of individual cases. In reality, there is not one possible case notion, but multiple intertwined case notions. For example, events may refer to mixtures of orders, items, packages, customers, and products. A package may refer to multiple items, multiple products, one order, and one customer. Therefore, we need to assume that each event refers to a collection of objects, each having a type (instead of a single case identifier). Such object-centric event logs are closer to data in real-life information systems. From an object-centric event log, we want to discover an object-centric Petri net with places that correspond to object types and transitions that may consume and produce collections of objects of different types. Object-centric Petri nets visualize the complex relationships among objects from different types. This paper discusses a novel process discovery approach implemented in PM4Py. As will be demonstrated, it is indeed feasible to discover holistic process models that can be used to drill-down into specific viewpoints if needed.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

An Open-Source Integration of Process Mining Features into the Camunda Workflow Engine: Data Extraction and Challenges

Process mining provides techniques to improve the performance and compliance of operational processes. Although sometimes the term "workflow mining" is used, the application in the context of Workflow Management (WFM) and Business Process Management (BPM) systems is limited. The main reason is that WFM/BPM systems control the process, leaving less room for flexibility and the corresponding deviations. However, as this paper shows, it is easy to extract event data from systems like Camunda, one of the leading open-source WFM/BPM systems. Moreover, although the respective process engines control the process flow, process mining is still able to provide valuable insights, such as the analysis of the performance of the paths and the mining of the decision rules. This demo paper presents a process mining connector to Camunda that extracts event logs and process models, allowing for the application of existing process mining tools. We also analyzed the added value of different process mining techniques in the context of Camunda. We discuss a subset of process mining techniques that nicely complements the process intelligence capabilities of Camunda. Through this demo paper, we hope to boost the use of process mining among Camunda users.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2020

A Novel Token-Based Replay Technique to Speed Up Conformance Checking and Process Enhancement

Token-based replay used to be the standard way to conduct conformance checking. With the uptake of more advanced techniques (e.g., alignment based), token-based replay got abandoned. However, despite decomposition approaches and heuristics to speed-up computation, the more advanced conformance checking techniques have limited scalability, especially when traces get longer and process models more complex. This paper presents an improved token-based replay approach that is much faster and scalable. Moreover, the approach provides more accurate diagnostics that avoid known problems (e.g., "token flooding") and help to pinpoint compliance problems. The novel token-based replay technique has been implemented in the PM4Py process mining library. We will show that the replay technique outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in terms of speed and/or diagnostics. %Moreover, a revision of an existing precision measure (ETConformance) will be proposed through integration with the token-based replayer.

cs.SE↗