Process mining techniques are able to extract knowledge from event logs commonly available in today’s information systems. These techniques provide new means to discover, monitor, and improve processes in a variety of application domains. There are two main drivers for the growing interest in process mining. On the one hand, more and more events are being recorded, thus, providing detailed information about the history of processes. On the other hand, there is a need to improve and support business processes in competitive and rapidly changing environments. This manifesto is created by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining and aims to promote the topic of process mining. Moreover, by defining a set of guiding principles and listing important challenges, this manifesto hopes to serve as a guide for software developers, scientists, consultants, business managers, and end-users. The goal is to increase the maturity of process mining as a new tool to improve the (re)design, control, and support of operational business processes

Process discovery is the problem of, given a log of observed behaviour, finding a process model that 'best' describes this behaviour. A large variety of process discovery algorithms has been proposed. However, no existing algorithm guarantees to return a fitting model (i.e., able to reproduce all observed behaviour) that is sound (free of deadlocks and other anomalies) in finite time. We present an extensible framework to discover from any given log a set of block-structured process models that are sound and fit the observed behaviour. In addition we characterise the minimal information required in the log to rediscover a particular process model. We then provide a polynomial-time algorithm for discovering a sound, fitting, block-structured model from any given log; we give sufficient conditions on the log for which our algorithm returns a model that is languageequivalent to the process model underlying the log, including unseen behaviour. The technique is implemented in a prototypical tool.

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Considerable amounts of data, including process events, are collected and stored by organisations nowadays. Discovering a process model from such event data and verification of the quality of discovered models are important steps in process mining. Many discovery techniques have been proposed, but none of them combines scalability with strong quality guarantees. We would like such techniques to handle billions of events or thousands of activities, to produce sound models (without deadlocks and other anomalies), and to guarantee that the underlying process can be rediscovered when sufficient information is available. In this paper, we introduce a framework for process discovery that ensures these properties while passing over the log only once and introduce three algorithms using the framework. To measure the quality of discovered models for such large logs, we introduce a model–model and model–log comparison framework that applies a divide-and-conquer strategy to measure recall, fitness, and precision. We experimentally show that these discovery and measuring techniques sacrifice little compared to other algorithms, while gaining the ability to cope with event logs of 100,000,000 traces and processes of 10,000 activities on a standard computer.

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Abstract. The quality of a business process model is presumably highly dependent upon the modeling process that was followed to create it. Still, there is a lack of concepts to investigate this connection empirically. This paper introduces the formal concept of a phase diagram through which the modeling process can be analyzed, and a corresponding implementation to study a modeler's sequence of actions. In an experiment building on these assets, we observed a group of modelers engaging in the act of modeling. The collected data is used to demonstrate our approach for analyzing the process of process modeling. Additionally, we are presenting first insights and sketch requirements for future experiments.

One of the main challenges in process mining is to discover a process model describing observed behaviour in the best possible manner. Since event logs only contain example behaviour and one cannot assume to have seen all possible process executions, process discovery techniques need to be able to handle incompleteness. In this paper, we study the effects of such incomplete logs on process discovery. We analyse the impact of incompleteness of logs on behavioural relations, which are an abstraction often used by process discovery techniques. We introduce probabilistic behavioural relations that are less sensitive to incompleteness, and exploit these relations to provide a more robust process discovery algorithm. We prove this algorithm to be able to rediscover a model of the original system. Furthermore, we show in experiments that our approach even rediscovers models from incomplete event logs that are much smaller than required by other process discovery algorithms.