Mining configurable process fragments for business process design

Abstract

As business requirements become increasingly challenging in today's fast changing environments, cross-organizational collaboration gains more and more attention for a successful business process design. Since many organizations may work on similar processes with some variations, configurable reference models have been proposed as a key aspect for a flexible process design. However, the complexity introduced by such models remains an open issue. The designer ends up with one model that integrates a family of process variants making the process design and update a complex task. In this work, we propose to assist the designer with configurable process fragments. However, instead of building the configurable process fragment from existing process models, we propose to use event logs as input. Such recorded executions capture the real behavior of processes which cannot be derived from their designed models. Then, using these logs we derive guidelines that direct the configuration of the resulted fragment. Our approach has been implemented as a plugin in the ProM framework and tested using a collection of event logs. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.