arXiv subjects

Marlon Dumas

Publications and source records attributed to Marlon Dumas.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

How Will My Business Process Unfold? Predicting Case Suffixes With Start and End Timestamps

Predictive process monitoring supports operational decision-making by forecasting future states of ongoing business cases. A key task is case suffix prediction, which estimates the remaining sequence of activities for a case. Most existing approaches only generate activities with a single timestamp (usually the completion time). However, this is insufficient for resource capacity planning, which requires distinguishing between waiting time and processing time to accurately schedule resources and manage workloads. This paper introduces a technique to predict case suffixes that include both start and end timestamps. By predicting distinct waiting and processing intervals, the method provides a more granular view of future resource demands.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Agentic Business Process Management: A Research Manifesto

This paper presents a manifesto that articulates the conceptual foundations of Agentic Business Process Management (APM), an extension of Business Process Management (BPM) for governing autonomous agents executing processes in organizations. From a management perspective, APM represents a paradigm shift from the traditional process view of the business process, driven by the realization of process awareness and an agent-oriented abstraction, where software and human agents act as primary functional entities that perceive, reason, and act within explicit process frames. This perspective marks a shift from traditional, automation-oriented BPM toward systems in which autonomy is constrained, aligned, and made operational through process awareness. We introduce the core abstractions and architectural elements required to realize APM systems and elaborate on four key capabilities that such APM agents must support: framed autonomy, explainability, conversational actionability, and self-modification. These capabilities jointly ensure that agents' goals are aligned with organizational goals and that agents behave in a framed yet proactive manner in pursuing those goals. We discuss the extent to which the capabilities can be realized and identify research challenges whose resolution requires further advances in BPM, AI, and multi-agent systems. The manifesto thus serves as a roadmap for bridging these communities and for guiding the development of APM systems in practice.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Agentic Business Process Management Systems

Since the early 90s, the evolution of the Business Process Management (BPM) discipline has been punctuated by successive waves of automation technologies. Some of these technologies enable the automation of individual tasks, while others focus on orchestrating the execution of end-to-end processes. The rise of Generative and Agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) is opening the way for another such wave. However, this wave is poised to be different because it shifts the focus from automation to autonomy and from design-driven management of business processes to data-driven management, leveraging process mining techniques. This position paper, based on a keynote talk at the 2025 Workshop on AI for BPM, outlines how process mining has laid the foundations on top of which agents can sense process states, reason about improvement opportunities, and act to maintain and optimize performance. The paper proposes an architectural vision for Agentic Business Process Management Systems (A-BPMS): a new class of platforms that integrate autonomy, reasoning, and learning into process management and execution. The paper contends that such systems must support a continuum of processes, spanning from human-driven to fully autonomous, thus redefining the boundaries of process automation and governance.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

Exploring LLM Features in Predictive Process Monitoring for Small-Scale Event-Logs

Predictive Process Monitoring is a branch of process mining that aims to predict the outcome of an ongoing process. Recently, it leveraged machine-and-deep learning architectures. In this paper, we extend our prior LLM-based Predictive Process Monitoring framework, which was initially focused on total time prediction via prompting. The extension consists of comprehensively evaluating its generality, semantic leverage, and reasoning mechanisms, also across multiple Key Performance Indicators. Empirical evaluations conducted on three distinct event logs and across the Key Performance Indicators of Total Time and Activity Occurrence prediction indicate that, in data-scarce settings with only 100 traces, the LLM surpasses the benchmark methods. Furthermore, the experiments also show that the LLM exploits both its embodied prior knowledge and the internal correlations among training traces. Finally, we examine the reasoning strategies employed by the model, demonstrating that the LLM does not merely replicate existing predictive methods but performs higher-order reasoning to generate the predictions.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

What's Coming Next? Short-Term Simulation of Business Processes from Current State

Business process simulation is an approach to evaluate business process changes prior to implementation. Existing methods in this field primarily support tactical decision-making, where simulations start from an empty state and aim to estimate the long-term effects of process changes. A complementary use-case is operational decision-making, where the goal is to forecast short-term performance based on ongoing cases and to analyze the impact of temporary disruptions, such as demand spikes and shortfalls in available resources. An approach to tackle this use-case is to run a long-term simulation up to a point where the workload is similar to the current one (warm-up), and measure performance thereon. However, this approach does not consider the current state of ongoing cases and resources in the process. This paper studies an alternative approach that initializes the simulation from a representation of the current state derived from an event log of ongoing cases. The paper addresses two challenges in operationalizing this approach: (1) Given a simulation model, what information is needed so that a simulation run can start from the current state of cases and resources? (2) How can the current state of a process be derived from an event log? The resulting short-term simulation approach is embodied in a simulation engine that takes as input a simulation model and a log of ongoing cases, and simulates cases for a given time horizon. An experimental evaluation shows that this approach yields more accurate short-term performance forecasts than long-term simulations with warm-up period, particularly in the presence of concept drift or bursty performance patterns.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

Optimization of Activity Batching Policies in Business Processes

In business processes, activity batching refers to packing multiple activity instances for joint execution. Batching allows managers to trade off cost and processing effort against waiting time. Larger and less frequent batches may lower costs by reducing processing effort and amortizing fixed costs, but they create longer waiting times. In contrast, smaller and more frequent batches reduce waiting times but increase fixed costs and processing effort. A batching policy defines how activity instances are grouped into batches and when each batch is activated. This paper addresses the problem of discovering batching policies that strike optimal trade-offs between waiting time, processing effort, and cost. The paper proposes a Pareto optimization approach that starts from a given set (possibly empty) of activity batching policies and generates alternative policies for each batched activity via intervention heuristics. Each heuristic identifies an opportunity to improve an activity's batching policy with respect to a metric (waiting time, processing time, cost, or resource utilization) and an associated adjustment to the activity's batching policy (the intervention). The impact of each intervention is evaluated via simulation. The intervention heuristics are embedded in an optimization meta-heuristic that triggers interventions to iteratively update the Pareto front of the interventions identified so far. The paper considers three meta-heuristics: hill-climbing, simulated annealing, and reinforcement learning. An experimental evaluation compares the proposed approach based on intervention heuristics against the same (non-heuristic guided) meta-heuristics baseline regarding convergence, diversity, and cycle time gain of Pareto-optimal policies.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Efficient Online Computation of Business Process State From Trace Prefixes via N-Gram Indexing

This paper addresses the following problem: Given a process model and an event log containing trace prefixes of ongoing cases of a process, map each case to its corresponding state (i.e., marking) in the model. This state computation operation is a building block of other process mining operations, such as log animation and short-term simulation. An approach to this state computation problem is to perform a token-based replay of each trace prefix against the model. However, when a trace prefix does not strictly follow the behavior of the process model, token replay may produce a state that is not reachable from the initial state of the process. An alternative approach is to first compute an alignment between the trace prefix of each ongoing case and the model, and then replay the aligned trace prefix. However, (prefix-)alignment is computationally expensive. This paper proposes a method that, given a trace prefix of an ongoing case, computes its state in constant time using an index that represents states as n-grams. An empirical evaluation shows that the proposed approach has an accuracy comparable to that of the prefix-alignment approach, while achieving a throughput of hundreds of thousands of traces per second.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Business Process Simulation: Probabilistic Modeling of Intermittent Resource Availability and Multitasking Behavior

In business process simulation, resource availability is typically modeled by assigning a calendar to each resource, e.g., Monday-Friday, 9:00-18:00. Resources are assumed to be always available during each time slot in their availability calendar. This assumption often becomes invalid due to interruptions, breaks, or time-sharing across processes. In other words, existing approaches fail to capture intermittent availability. Another limitation of existing approaches is that they either do not consider multitasking behavior, or if they do, they assume that resources always multitask (up to a maximum capacity) whenever available. However, studies have shown that the multitasking patterns vary across days. This paper introduces a probabilistic approach to model resource availability and multitasking behavior for business process simulation. In this approach, each time slot in a resource calendar has an associated availability probability and a multitasking probability per multitasking level. For example, a resource may be available on Fridays between 14:00-15:00 with 90\% probability, and given that they are performing one task during this slot, they may take on a second concurrent task with 60\% probability. We propose algorithms to discover probabilistic calendars and probabilistic multitasking capacities from event logs. An evaluation shows that, with these enhancements, simulation models discovered from event logs better replicate the distribution of activities and cycle times, relative to approaches with crisp calendars and monotasking assumptions.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

Discovery and Simulation of Data-Aware Business Processes

Simulation is a common approach to predict the effect of business process changes on quantitative performance. The starting point of Business Process Simulation (BPS) is a process model enriched with simulation parameters. To cope with the typically large parameter spaces of BPS models, several methods have been proposed to automatically discover BPS models from event logs. Virtually all these approaches neglect the data perspective of business processes. Yet, the data attributes manipulated by a business process often determine which activities are performed, how many times, and when. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a data-aware BPS modeling approach and a method to discover data-aware BPS models from event logs. The BPS modeling approach supports three types of data attributes (global, case-level, and event-level) as well as deterministic and stochastic attribute update rules and data-aware branching conditions. An empirical evaluation shows that the proposed method accurately discovers the type of each data attribute and its associated update rules, and that the resulting BPS models more closely replicate the process execution control flow relative to data-unaware BPS models.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Enhancing Business Process Simulation Models with Extraneous Activity Delays

Business Process Simulation (BPS) is a common approach to estimate the impact of changes to a business process on its performance measures. For example, it allows us to estimate what would be the cycle time of a process if we automated one of its activities, or if some resources become unavailable. The starting point of BPS is a business process model annotated with simulation parameters (a BPS model). In traditional approaches, BPS models are manually designed by modeling specialists. This approach is time-consuming and error-prone. To address this shortcoming, several studies have proposed methods to automatically discover BPS models from event logs via process mining techniques. However, current techniques in this space discover BPS models that only capture waiting times caused by resource contention or resource unavailability. Oftentimes, a considerable portion of the waiting time in a business process corresponds to extraneous delays, e.g., a resource waits for the customer to return a phone call. This article proposes a method that discovers extraneous delays from event logs of business process executions. The proposed approach computes, for each pair of causally consecutive activity instances in the event log, the time when the target activity instance should theoretically have started, given the availability of the relevant resource. Based on the difference between the theoretical and the actual start times, the approach estimates the distribution of extraneous delays, and it enhances the BPS model with timer events to capture these delays. An empirical evaluation involving synthetic and real-life logs shows that the approach produces BPS models that better reflect the temporal dynamics of the process, relative to BPS models that do not capture extraneous delays.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Prescriptive Process Monitoring Under Resource Constraints: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

Prescriptive process monitoring methods seek to optimize the performance of business processes by triggering interventions at runtime, thereby increasing the probability of positive case outcomes. These interventions are triggered according to an intervention policy. Reinforcement learning has been put forward as an approach to learning intervention policies through trial and error. Existing approaches in this space assume that the number of resources available to perform interventions in a process is unlimited, an unrealistic assumption in practice. This paper argues that, in the presence of resource constraints, a key dilemma in the field of prescriptive process monitoring is to trigger interventions based not only on predictions of their necessity, timeliness, or effect but also on the uncertainty of these predictions and the level of resource utilization. Indeed, committing scarce resources to an intervention when the necessity or effects of this intervention are highly uncertain may intuitively lead to suboptimal intervention effects. Accordingly, the paper proposes a reinforcement learning approach for prescriptive process monitoring that leverages conformal prediction techniques to consider the uncertainty of the predictions upon which an intervention decision is based. An evaluation using real-life datasets demonstrates that explicitly modeling uncertainty using conformal predictions helps reinforcement learning agents converge towards policies with higher net intervention gain

cs.AI↗

arXiv2023

Enhancing the Accuracy of Predictors of Activity Sequences of Business Processes

Predictive process monitoring is an evolving research field that studies how to train and use predictive models for operational decision-making. One of the problems studied in this field is that of predicting the sequence of upcoming activities in a case up to its completion, a.k.a. the case suffix. The prediction of case suffixes provides input to estimate short-term workloads and execution times under different resource schedules. Existing methods to address this problem often generate suffixes wherein some activities are repeated many times, whereas this pattern is not observed in the data. Closer examination shows that this shortcoming stems from the approach used to sample the successive activity instances to generate a case suffix. Accordingly, the paper introduces a sampling approach aimed at reducing repetitions of activities in the predicted case suffixes. The approach, namely Daemon action, strikes a balance between exploration and exploitation when generating the successive activity instances. We enhance a deep learning approach for case suffix predictions using this sampling approach, and experimentally show that the enhanced approach outperforms the unenhanced ones with respect to control-flow accuracy measures.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Can I Trust My Simulation Model? Measuring the Quality of Business Process Simulation Models

Business Process Simulation (BPS) is an approach to analyze the performance of business processes under different scenarios. For example, BPS allows us to estimate what would be the cycle time of a process if one or more resources became unavailable. The starting point of BPS is a process model annotated with simulation parameters (a BPS model). BPS models may be manually designed, based on information collected from stakeholders and empirical observations, or automatically discovered from execution data. Regardless of its origin, a key question when using a BPS model is how to assess its quality. In this paper, we propose a collection of measures to evaluate the quality of a BPS model w.r.t. its ability to replicate the observed behavior of the process. We advocate an approach whereby different measures tackle different process perspectives. We evaluate the ability of the proposed measures to discern the impact of modifications to a BPS model, and their ability to uncover the relative strengths and weaknesses of two approaches for automated discovery of BPS models. The evaluation shows that the measures not only capture how close a BPS model is to the observed behavior, but they also help us to identify sources of discrepancies.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2023

Learning When to Treat Business Processes: Prescriptive Process Monitoring with Causal Inference and Reinforcement Learning

Increasing the success rate of a process, i.e. the percentage of cases that end in a positive outcome, is a recurrent process improvement goal. At runtime, there are often certain actions (a.k.a. treatments) that workers may execute to lift the probability that a case ends in a positive outcome. For example, in a loan origination process, a possible treatment is to issue multiple loan offers to increase the probability that the customer takes a loan. Each treatment has a cost. Thus, when defining policies for prescribing treatments to cases, managers need to consider the net gain of the treatments. Also, the effect of a treatment varies over time: treating a case earlier may be more effective than later in a case. This paper presents a prescriptive monitoring method that automates this decision-making task. The method combines causal inference and reinforcement learning to learn treatment policies that maximize the net gain. The method leverages a conformal prediction technique to speed up the convergence of the reinforcement learning mechanism by separating cases that are likely to end up in a positive or negative outcome, from uncertain cases. An evaluation on two real-life datasets shows that the proposed method outperforms a state-of-the-art baseline.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Differentially Private Release of Event Logs for Process Mining

The applicability of process mining techniques hinges on the availability of event logs capturing the execution of a business process. In some use cases, particularly those involving customer-facing processes, these event logs may contain private information. Data protection regulations restrict the use of such event logs for analysis purposes. One way of circumventing these restrictions is to anonymize the event log to the extent that no individual can be singled out using the anonymized log. This article addresses the problem of anonymizing an event log in order to guarantee that, upon release of the anonymized log, the probability that an attacker may single out any individual represented in the original log does not increase by more than a threshold. The article proposes a differentially private release mechanism, which samples the cases in the log and adds noise to the timestamps to the extent required to achieve the above privacy guarantee. The article reports on an empirical comparison of the proposed approach against the state-of-the-art approaches using 14 real-life event logs in terms of data utility loss and computational efficiency.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2022

Intervening With Confidence: Conformal Prescriptive Monitoring of Business Processes

Prescriptive process monitoring methods seek to improve the performance of a process by selectively triggering interventions at runtime (e.g., offering a discount to a customer) to increase the probability of a desired case outcome (e.g., a customer making a purchase). The backbone of a prescriptive process monitoring method is an intervention policy, which determines for which cases and when an intervention should be executed. Existing methods in this field rely on predictive models to define intervention policies; specifically, they consider policies that trigger an intervention when the estimated probability of a negative outcome exceeds a threshold. However, the probabilities computed by a predictive model may come with a high level of uncertainty (low confidence), leading to unnecessary interventions and, thus, wasted effort. This waste is particularly problematic when the resources available to execute interventions are limited. To tackle this shortcoming, this paper proposes an approach to extend existing prescriptive process monitoring methods with so-called conformal predictions, i.e., predictions with confidence guarantees. An empirical evaluation using real-life public datasets shows that conformal predictions enhance the net gain of prescriptive process monitoring methods under limited resources.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Why am I Waiting? Data-Driven Analysis of Waiting Times in Business Processes

Waiting times in a business process often arise when a case transitions from one activity to another. Accordingly, analyzing the causes of waiting times of activity transitions can help analysts to identify opportunities for reducing the cycle time of a process. This paper proposes a process mining approach to decompose the waiting time observed in each activity transition in a process into multiple direct causes and to analyze the impact of each identified cause on the cycle time efficiency of the process. An empirical evaluation shows that the proposed approach is able to discover different direct causes of waiting times. The applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated on a real-life process.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2022

AI-Augmented Business Process Management Systems: A Research Manifesto

AI-Augmented Business Process Management Systems (ABPMSs) are an emerging class of process-aware information systems, empowered by trustworthy AI technology. An ABPMS enhances the execution of business processes with the aim of making these processes more adaptable, proactive, explainable, and context-sensitive. This manifesto presents a vision for ABPMSs and discusses research challenges that need to be surmounted to realize this vision. To this end, we define the concept of ABPMS, we outline the lifecycle of processes within an ABPMS, we discuss core characteristics of an ABPMS, and we derive a set of challenges to realize systems with these characteristics.

cs.AI↗