Towards Goal-Oriented Process Mining

Abstract

The growth of our digital world makes it possible to record many types of events. In particular, the number of business processes whose events are being logged is significantly increasing. Process mining is an approach that exploits event logs to discover real processes executed in organizations, enabling them to (re)design and improve process models. Goal modeling, on the other hand, is a requirements engineering approach mainly used to analyze what-if situations and support decision making. Common problems with process mining include the complexity of discovered "spaghetti" processes and a lack of goal-process alignment. Current process mining practices are mainly oriented towards activities and do not profit from considering stakeholder goals and requirements to manage complexity and alignment. Involving goalrelated factors can augment the precision and interpretability of mined models and lead to better opportunities to satisfy stakeholders. In this research, I propose two methods (for goal-oriented process and enhancement discovery, and for conformance checking) that show potentially synergetic effects achievable by combining process mining and goal-oriented modeling. The paper reports on the research method, the gap/problems being addressed, preliminary solutions, expected contributions, and main foreseen challenges.

Elicitation Approaches and Techniques for Automating Business Processes

“…Other methods transcribed the domain documentation into requirements [90], [95]. Process mining was employed to elicit requirements by extracting knowledge from logs [58], [60], [113], [114]. Approaches such as KAOS and i* elicit functional and non-functional requirements based on goals [38], [129].…”

“…Observation [22], [54], [97], [111] 4 Oppl's Approach [115] 1 Problem Frames (PF) [22], [97] 2 Process Mining [58], [60], [113], [114] 4 Protocol Analysis [21], [22], [38] 3 Requirements Elicitation for Adaptive Socio-Technical Systems Using Repertory Grid (REASSURE) [116] 1…”

“…[115] utilized card sorting and viewpoints to capture a comprehensive representation of the overall business process. [58], [60], [113], [114] employed process mining to discover the real processes from event logs in information systems.…”

What Requirements Engineering can Learn from Process Mining

“…Goal-oriented conformance checking (GoCC), recently introduced in [22], is a data-driven method that aims to find new requirements through event logs, instead of eliciting them from stakeholder goals or requirements documented in goal models.…”