Assessing the Suitability of Traditional Event Log Standards for IoT-Enhanced Event Logs

Abstract

Since IoT devices supporting business processes (BPs) in sectors like manufacturing, logistics or healthcare can collect data on the execution of the processes, there is a growing awareness of the opportunity to use IoT data for process mining (PM). However, several challenges need to be addressed to enable IoT-enhanced PM, among which the need for a standard IoT-enhanced event log model. In this paper, we identify four main challenges for the integration of IoT data in event logs, from which 10 requirements for an IoT-enhanced event log model are derived. We then analyse the two main current event log models, the extensible event stream (XES) and the object-centric event log (OCEL), and confront them with the requirements, showing that both present important limitations to storing IoT-enhanced event logs. Based on this analysis, we conclude that a comprehensive data model is required to develop more advanced IoT-enhanced PM techniques.