Mining shift work operation from event logs

Abstract

Event logs are records of events that are generally used in process mining to determine the manner in which various processes are practically implemented. Previous studies on process mining attempted to combine the results based on different perspectives such as control flow, data, performance, and resources (organizational) to create a simulation model. This study focuses on the resource perspective. A prior study from the resource perspective focused on clustering the resources into organizational units. Implementing the results of the above study in a simulation model will yield inaccurate results because the resources are assumed to always be available if no task is performed. In a practical scenario, resources (particularly humans) tend to work based on shifts. Thus, we propose mining the shift work operation of resources from event logs to tackle this issue. We utilized a self-organizing map and k-means clustering to incorporate the shift work information from the event logs into the simulation model. Moreover, we introduce a distance function and weight-centroid updating rule in the clustering technique to realize our objective. We conducted extensive experiments with artificial data sets to assess the effectiveness of the proposed method. The simulation shows that introducing the shift work operation time of resources can yield more accurate results. Furthermore, the proposed distance function can capture the shift work operation of the resources more precisely compared with the general distance function.