arXiv subjects

Wil M. P. van der Aalst

Publications and source records attributed to Wil M. P. van der Aalst.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Applying Process Mining on Scientific Workflows: a Case Study on High Performance Computing Data

Computer-based scientific experiments are becoming increasingly data-intensive, necessitating the use of High-Performance Computing (HPC) clusters to handle large scientific workflows. These workflows result in complex data and control flows within the system, making analysis challenging. This paper focuses on the extraction of case IDs from SLURM-based HPC cluster logs, a crucial step for applying mainstream process mining techniques. The core contribution is the development of methods to correlate jobs in the system, whether their interdependencies are explicitly specified or not. We present our log extraction and correlation techniques, supported by experiments that validate our approach, enabling comprehensive documentation of workflows and identification of performance bottlenecks.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2025

ProReco: A Process Discovery Recommender System

Process discovery aims to automatically derive process models from historical execution data (event logs). While various process discovery algorithms have been proposed in the last 25 years, there is no consensus on a dominating discovery algorithm. Selecting the most suitable discovery algorithm remains a challenge due to competing quality measures and diverse user requirements. Manually selecting the most suitable process discovery algorithm from a range of options for a given event log is a time-consuming and error-prone task. This paper introduces ProReco, a Process discovery Recommender system designed to recommend the most appropriate algorithm based on user preferences and event log characteristics. ProReco incorporates state-of-the-art discovery algorithms, extends the feature pools from previous work, and utilizes eXplainable AI (XAI) techniques to provide explanations for its recommendations.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Control-flow anomaly detection by process mining-based feature extraction and dimensionality reduction

The business processes of organizations may deviate from normal control flow due to disruptive anomalies, including unknown, skipped, and wrongly-ordered activities. To identify these control-flow anomalies, process mining can check control-flow correctness against a reference process model through conformance checking, an explainable set of algorithms that allows linking any deviations with model elements. However, the effectiveness of conformance checking-based techniques is negatively affected by noisy event data and low-quality process models. To address these shortcomings and support the development of competitive and explainable conformance checking-based techniques for control-flow anomaly detection, we propose a novel process mining-based feature extraction approach with alignment-based conformance checking. This variant aligns the deviating control flow with a reference process model; the resulting alignment can be inspected to extract additional statistics such as the number of times a given activity caused mismatches. We integrate this approach into a flexible and explainable framework for developing techniques for control-flow anomaly detection. The framework combines process mining-based feature extraction and dimensionality reduction to handle high-dimensional feature sets, achieve detection effectiveness, and support explainability. The results show that the framework techniques implementing our approach outperform the baseline conformance checking-based techniques while maintaining the explainable nature of conformance checking. We also provide an explanation of why existing conformance checking-based techniques may be ineffective.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

Federated Conformance Checking

Conformance checking is a crucial aspect of process mining, where the main objective is to compare the actual execution of a process, as recorded in an event log, with a reference process model, e.g., in the form of a Petri net or a BPMN. Conformance checking enables identifying deviations, anomalies, or non-compliance instances. It offers different perspectives on problems in processes, bottlenecks, or process instances that are not compliant with the model. Performing conformance checking in federated (inter-organizational) settings allows organizations to gain insights into the overall process execution and to identify compliance issues across organizational boundaries, which facilitates process improvement efforts among collaborating entities. In this paper, we propose a privacy-aware federated conformance-checking approach that allows for evaluating the correctness of overall cross-organizational process models, identifying miscommunications, and quantifying their costs. For evaluation, we design and simulate a supply chain process with three organizations engaged in purchase-to-pay, order-to-cash, and shipment processes. We generate synthetic event logs for each organization as well as the complete process, and we apply our approach to identify and evaluate the cost of pre-injected miscommunications.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Evaluating Large Language Models on Business Process Modeling: Framework, Benchmark, and Self-Improvement Analysis

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transforming various fields, and their potential in Business Process Management (BPM) is substantial. This paper assesses the capabilities of LLMs on business process modeling using a framework for automating this task, a comprehensive benchmark, and an analysis of LLM self-improvement strategies. We present a comprehensive evaluation of 16 state-of-the-art LLMs from major AI vendors using a custom-designed benchmark of 20 diverse business processes. Our analysis highlights significant performance variations across LLMs and reveals a positive correlation between efficient error handling and the quality of generated models. It also shows consistent performance trends within similar LLM groups. Furthermore, we investigate LLM self-improvement techniques, encompassing self-evaluation, input optimization, and output optimization. Our findings indicate that output optimization, in particular, offers promising potential for enhancing quality, especially in models with initially lower performance. Our contributions provide insights for leveraging LLMs in BPM, paving the way for more advanced and automated process modeling techniques.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

Object-Centric Local Process Models

Process mining is a technology that helps understand, analyze, and improve processes. It has been present for around two decades, and although initially tailored for business processes, the spectrum of analyzed processes nowadays is evermore growing. To support more complex and diverse processes, subdisciplines such as object-centric process mining and behavioral pattern mining have emerged. Behavioral patterns allow for analyzing parts of the process in isolation, while object-centric process mining enables combining different perspectives of the process. In this work, we introduce \emph{Object-Centric Local Process Models} (OCLPMs). OCLPMs are behavioral patterns tailored to analyzing complex processes where no single case notion exists and we leverage object-centric Petri nets to model them. Additionally, we present a discovery algorithm that starts from object-centric event logs, and implement the proposed approach in the open-source framework ProM. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability of OCLPMs in two case studies and evaluate the approach on various event logs.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

Towards a Simple and Extensible Standard for Object-Centric Event Data (OCED) -- Core Model, Design Space, and Lessons Learned

Process mining is shifting towards use cases that explicitly leverage the relations between data objects and events under the term of object-centric process mining. Realizing this shift and generally simplifying the exchange and transformation of data between source systems and process mining solutions requires a standardized data format for such object-centric event data (OCED). This report summarizes the activities and results for identifying requirements and challenges for a community-supported standard for OCED. (1) We present a proposal for a core model for object-centric event data that underlies all known use cases. (2) We detail the limitations of the core model wrt. a broad range of use cases and discuss how to overcome them through conventions, usage patterns, and extensions of OCED, exhausting the design-space for an OCED data model and the inherent trade-offs in representing object-centric event data. (3) These insights are backed by five independent OCED implementations which are presented alongside a series of lessons learned in academic and industrial case studies. The results of this report provide guidance to the community to start adopting and building new process mining use cases and solutions around the reliable concepts for object-centric event data, and to engage in a structured process for standardizing OCED based on the known OCED design space.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

Leveraging Large Language Models for Enhanced Process Model Comprehension

In Business Process Management (BPM), effectively comprehending process models is crucial yet poses significant challenges, particularly as organizations scale and processes become more complex. This paper introduces a novel framework utilizing the advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance the interpretability of complex process models. We present different methods for abstracting business process models into a format accessible to LLMs, and we implement advanced prompting strategies specifically designed to optimize LLM performance within our framework. Additionally, we present a tool, AIPA, that implements our proposed framework and allows for conversational process querying. We evaluate our framework and tool by i) an automatic evaluation comparing different LLMs, model abstractions, and prompting strategies and ii) a user study designed to assess AIPA's effectiveness comprehensively. Results demonstrate our framework's ability to improve the accessibility and interpretability of process models, pioneering new pathways for integrating AI technologies into the BPM field.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

PM-LLM-Benchmark: Evaluating Large Language Models on Process Mining Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to semi-automate some process mining (PM) analyses. While commercial models are already adequate for many analytics tasks, the competitive level of open-source LLMs in PM tasks is unknown. In this paper, we propose PM-LLM-Benchmark, the first comprehensive benchmark for PM focusing on domain knowledge (process-mining-specific and process-specific) and on different implementation strategies. We focus also on the challenges in creating such a benchmark, related to the public availability of the data and on evaluation biases by the LLMs. Overall, we observe that most of the considered LLMs can perform some process mining tasks at a satisfactory level, but tiny models that would run on edge devices are still inadequate. We also conclude that while the proposed benchmark is useful for identifying LLMs that are adequate for process mining tasks, further research is needed to overcome the evaluation biases and perform a more thorough ranking of the competitive LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Challenges of Anomaly Detection in the Object-Centric Setting: Dimensions and the Role of Domain Knowledge

Object-centric event logs, allowing events related to different objects of different object types, represent naturally the execution of business processes, such as ERP (O2C and P2P) and CRM. However, modeling such complex information requires novel process mining techniques and might result in complex sets of constraints. Object-centric anomaly detection exploits both the lifecycle and the interactions between the different objects. Therefore, anomalous patterns are proposed to the user without requiring the definition of object-centric process models. This paper proposes different methodologies for object-centric anomaly detection and discusses the role of domain knowledge for these methodologies. We discuss the advantages and limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the provision of such domain knowledge. Following our experience in a real-life P2P process, we also discuss the role of algorithms (dimensionality reduction+anomaly detection), suggest some pre-processing steps, and discuss the role of feature propagation.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

How to Write Beautiful Process-and-Data-Science Papers?

After 25 years of PhD supervision, the author noted typical recurring problems that make papers look sloppy, difficult to read, and incoherent. The goal is not to write a paper for the sake of writing a paper, but to convey a valuable message that is clear and precise. The goal is to write papers that have an impact and are still understandable a couple of decades later. Our mission should be to create papers of high quality that people want to read and that can stand the test of time. We use Dijkstra's adagium "Beauty Is Our Business" to stress the importance of simplicity, correctness, and cleanness.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2024

High-Level Event Mining: Overview and Future Work

Process mining traditionally relies on input consisting of low-level events that capture individual activities, such as filling out a form or processing a product. However, many of the complex problems inherent in processes, such as bottlenecks and compliance issues, extend beyond the scope of individual events and process instances. Consider congestion, for instance, it can involve and impact numerous cases, much like how a traffic jam affects many cars simultaneously. High-level event mining seeks to address such phenomena using the regular event data available. This report offers an extensive and comprehensive overview at existing work and challenges encountered when lifting the perspective from individual events and cases to system-level events.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

ProMoAI: Process Modeling with Generative AI

ProMoAI is a novel tool that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate process models from textual descriptions, incorporating advanced prompt engineering, error handling, and code generation techniques. Beyond automating the generation of complex process models, ProMoAI also supports process model optimization. Users can interact with the tool by providing feedback on the generated model, which is then used for refining the process model. ProMoAI utilizes the capabilities LLMs to offer a novel, AI-driven approach to process modeling, significantly reducing the barrier to entry for users without deep technical knowledge in process modeling.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

Process Modeling With Large Language Models

In the realm of Business Process Management (BPM), process modeling plays a crucial role in translating complex process dynamics into comprehensible visual representations, facilitating the understanding, analysis, improvement, and automation of organizational processes. Traditional process modeling methods often require extensive expertise and can be time-consuming. This paper explores the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into process modeling to enhance the accessibility of process modeling, offering a more intuitive entry point for non-experts while augmenting the efficiency of experts. We propose a framework that leverages LLMs for the automated generation and iterative refinement of process models starting from textual descriptions. Our framework involves innovative prompting strategies for effective LLM utilization, along with a secure model generation protocol and an error-handling mechanism. Moreover, we instantiate a concrete system extending our framework. This system provides robust quality guarantees on the models generated and supports exporting them in standard modeling notations, such as the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and Petri nets. Preliminary results demonstrate the framework's ability to streamline process modeling tasks, underscoring the transformative potential of generative AI in the BPM field.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Process-Aware Analysis of Treatment Paths in Heart Failure Patients: A Case Study

Process mining in healthcare presents a range of challenges when working with different types of data within the healthcare domain. There is high diversity considering the variety of data collected from healthcare processes: operational processes given by claims data, a collection of events during surgery, data related to pre-operative and post-operative care, and high-level data collections based on regular ambulant visits with no apparent events. In this case study, a data set from the last category is analyzed. We apply process-mining techniques on sparse patient heart failure data and investigate whether an information gain towards several research questions is achievable. Here, available data are transformed into an event log format, and process discovery and conformance checking are applied. Additionally, patients are split into different cohorts based on comorbidities, such as diabetes and chronic kidney disease, and multiple statistics are compared between the cohorts. Conclusively, we apply decision mining to determine whether a patient will have a cardiovascular outcome and whether a patient will die.

stat.AP↗

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

Developing a High-Performance Process Mining Library with Java and Python Bindings in Rust

The most commonly used open-source process mining software tools today are ProM and PM4Py, written in Java and Python, respectively. Such high-level, often interpreted, programming languages trade off performance with memory safety and ease-of-use. In contrast, traditional compiled languages, like C or C++, can achieve top performance but often suffer from instability related to unsafe memory management. Lately, Rust emerged as a highly performant, compiled programming language with inherent memory safety. In this paper, we describe our approach to developing a shared process mining library in Rust with bindings to both Java and Python, allowing full integration into the existing ecosystems, like ProM and PM4Py. By facilitating interoperability, our methodology enables researchers or industry to develop novel algorithms in Rust once and make them accessible to the entire community while also achieving superior performance.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2024

Discovering Process Models With Long-Term Dependencies While Providing Guarantees and Filtering Infrequent Behavior Patterns

In process discovery, the goal is to find, for a given event log, the model describing the underlying process. While process models can be represented in a variety of ways, Petri nets form a theoretically well-explored description language and are therefore often used. In this paper, we extend the eST-Miner process discovery algorithm. The eST-Miner computes a set of Petri net places which are considered to be fitting with respect to a certain fraction of the behavior described by the given event log as indicated by a given noise threshold. It evaluates all possible candidate places using token-based replay. The set of replayable traces is determined for each place in isolation, i.e., these sets do not need to be consistent. This allows the algorithm to abstract from infrequent behavioral patterns occurring only in some traces. However, when combining places into a Petri net by connecting them to the corresponding uniquely labeled transitions, the resulting net can replay exactly those traces from the event log that are allowed by the combination of all inserted places. Thus, inserting places one-by-one without considering their combined effect may result in deadlocks and low fitness of the Petri net. In this paper, we explore adaptions of the eST-Miner, that aim to select a subset of places such that the resulting Petri net guarantees a definable minimal fitness while maintaining high precision with respect to the input event log. Furthermore, current place evaluation techniques tend to block the execution of infrequent activity labels. Thus, a refined place fitness metric is introduced and thoroughly investigated. In our experiments we use real and artificial event logs to evaluate and compare the impact of the various place selection strategies and place fitness evaluation metrics on the returned Petri net.

cs.DB↗