Logic-based incremental process mining in smart environments

Abstract

Understanding what the user is doing in a Smart Environment is important not only for adapting the environment behavior, e.g. by providing the most appropriate combination of services for the recognized situation, but also for identifying situations that could be problematic for the user. Manually building models of the user processes is a complex, costly and error-prone engineering task. Hence, the interest in automatically learning them from examples of actual procedures. Incremental adaptation of the models, and the ability to express/learn complex conditions on the involved tasks, are also desirable. First-order logic provides a single comprehensive and powerful framework for supporting all of the above. This paper presents a First-Order Logic incremental method for inferring process models, and show its application to the user's daily routines, for predicting his needs and comparing the actual situation with the expected one. Promising results have been obtained with both controlled experiments that proved its efficiency and effectiveness, and with a domain-specific dataset. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.