Prediction of remaining service execution time using stochastic petri nets with arbitrary firing delays

Abstract

Companies realize their services by business processes to stay competitive in a dynamic market environment. In particular, they track the current state of the process to detect undesired deviations, to provide customers with predicted remaining durations, and to improve the ability to schedule resources accordingly. In this setting, we propose an approach to predict remaining process execution time, taking into account passed time since the last observed event. While existing approaches update predictions only upon event arrival and subtract elapsed time from the latest predictions, our method also considers expected events that have not yet occurred, resulting in better prediction quality. Moreover, the prediction approach is based on the Petri net formalism and is able to model concurrency appropriately. We present the algorithm and its implementation in ProM and compare its predictive performance to state-of-the-art approaches in simulated experiments and in an industry case study. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.