Process discovery, as one of the most challenging process analysis techniques, aims to uncover business process models from event logs. Many process discovery approaches were invented in the past twenty years;however,...Process discovery, as one of the most challenging process analysis techniques, aims to uncover business process models from event logs. Many process discovery approaches were invented in the past twenty years;however, most of them have difficulties in handling multi-instance sub-processes. To address this challenge, we first introduce a multi-instance business process model(MBPM) to support the modeling of processes with multiple sub-process instantiations. Formal semantics of MBPMs are precisely defined by using multi-instance Petri nets(MPNs)that are an extension of Petri nets with distinguishable tokens.Then, a novel process discovery technique is developed to support the discovery of MBPMs from event logs with sub-process multi-instantiation information. In addition, we propose to measure the quality of the discovered MBPMs against the input event logs by transforming an MBPM to a classical Petri net such that existing quality metrics, e.g., fitness and precision, can be used.The proposed discovery approach is properly implemented as plugins in the Pro M toolkit. Based on a cloud resource management case study, we compare our approach with the state-of-theart process discovery techniques. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing approaches to discover process models with multi-instance sub-processes.展开更多
基金supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(61902222)the Taishan Scholars Program of Shandong Province(tsqn201909109)+1 种基金the Natural Science Excellent Youth Foundation of Shandong Province(ZR2021YQ45)the Youth Innovation Science and Technology Team Foundation of Shandong Higher School(2021KJ031)。
文摘Process discovery, as one of the most challenging process analysis techniques, aims to uncover business process models from event logs. Many process discovery approaches were invented in the past twenty years;however, most of them have difficulties in handling multi-instance sub-processes. To address this challenge, we first introduce a multi-instance business process model(MBPM) to support the modeling of processes with multiple sub-process instantiations. Formal semantics of MBPMs are precisely defined by using multi-instance Petri nets(MPNs)that are an extension of Petri nets with distinguishable tokens.Then, a novel process discovery technique is developed to support the discovery of MBPMs from event logs with sub-process multi-instantiation information. In addition, we propose to measure the quality of the discovered MBPMs against the input event logs by transforming an MBPM to a classical Petri net such that existing quality metrics, e.g., fitness and precision, can be used.The proposed discovery approach is properly implemented as plugins in the Pro M toolkit. Based on a cloud resource management case study, we compare our approach with the state-of-theart process discovery techniques. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing approaches to discover process models with multi-instance sub-processes.
