An Agent-Based Process Mining Architecture for Emergent Behavior Analysis

Abstract

Information systems leave a traceable digital footprint whenever an action is executed. Business process modelers capture these digital traces to understand the behavior of a system, and to extract actual run-time models of those business processes. Despite the omnipresence of such traces, most organizations face substantial differences between the process specifications and the actual run-time behavior. Analyzing and implementing the results of systems that model business processes tend, however, to be difficult due to the inherent complexity of the models. Moreover, the observed reality in the form of lower-level real-time events, as recorded in event logs, is seldom solely explainable by higher-level process models. In this paper, we propose an architecture to model systemwide behavior by combining process mining with a multi-agent system. Digital traces, in the form of event logs, are used to iteratively mine process models from which agents can learn. The approach is initially applied to a case study of a simplified job-shop factory in which automated guided vehicles (AGVs) carry out transportation tasks. Numerical experiments show that the workflow of a process mining model can be used to enhance the agent-based system, particularly, in analyzing bottlenecks and improving decision-making.

A Design of the Resilient Enterprise: A Reference Architecture for Emergent Behaviors Control

“…To this end, we reuse existing architectural components by conducting a SLR. Furthermore, we build further on our own work-in-progress efforts [ 19 , 20 ]. To guide the collection and review process, we conduct a SLR by following the guidelines as proposed by Kitchenham [ 23 ], Kitchenham et al [ 24 ], and Rouhani et al [ 25 ].…”

“…The results of both scoring criteria were merged and all papers with an aggregated score of at least 6 were included in the literature list. Complementing this list with our previous two articles [ 19 , 20 ] and four manually added papers [ 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 ], resulted into a total of 46 papers [ 19 , 20 , 64 , 65 , 66 , 67 , 68 , 69 , 70 , 71 , 72 , 73 , 74 , 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 , 81 , 82 , 83 , 84 , 85 , 86 , 87 , 88 , 89 , 90 , 91 , 92 , 93 , 94 , 95 , 96 , 97 , 98 , 99 , 100 , 101 , 102 , 103 , 104 , 105 , 106 ,…”

“…Nevertheless, a total of 26 ( ) papers concerned either an ongoing study or a complete study, which implies that there is some mature basis from whereon we can build further. Furthermore, it is interesting that several papers [ 19 , 20 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 86 , 93 , 95 , 96 ] use agent-based modeling techniques to support their work.…”

“…Inherent to human’s involvement are the resulting emergent behaviors [ 78 ]. An intelligent agent (e.g., a piece of software) can emulate behaviors and interact with humans to upskill mutual decision-making capabilities on understanding emergent behaviors [ 19 , 20 ]. A CS can complement a human’s expertise but also vice versa, taking the best of both by working in harmony.…”

“…As there is a vast and scattered amount of literature on emergent behavior components for architectures, we conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to discuss relevant and currently used architectural building blocks and to derive architectural practices. We supplement these findings with our (work-in-progress) efforts on such designs [ 19 , 20 ]. More precisely, we show how enterprise-wide behavior and goals can be united with the behavior of local autonomous entities, aiming for an adequate reaction to disturbances.…”