Discovering stochastic Petri nets with arbitrary delay distributions from event logs

Abstract

Capturing the performance of a system or business process as accurately as possible is important, as models enriched with performance information provide valuable input for analysis, operational support, and prediction. Due to their computationally nice properties, memoryless models such as exponentially distributed stochastic Petri nets have earned much attention in research and industry. However, there are cases when the memoryless property is clearly not able to capture process behavior, e.g., when dealing with fixed time-outs. We want to allow models to have generally distributed durations to be able to capture the behavior of the environment and resources as accurately as possible. For these more expressive process models, the execution policy has to be specified in more detail. In this paper, we present and evaluate process discovery algorithms for each of the execution policies. The introduced approach uses raw event execution data to discover various classes of stochastic Petri nets. The algorithms are based on the notion of alignments and have been implemented as a plug-in in the process mining framework ProM. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.