Abstract
Modern enterprises increasingly use the workflow paradigm to prescribe how business processes should be performed. Processes are typically modeled as annotated activity graphs. We present an approach for a system that constructs process models from logs of past, unstructured executions of the given process. The graph so produced conforms to the dependencies and past executions present in the log. By providing models that capture the previous executions of the process, this technique allows easier introduction of a workflow system and evaluation and evolution of existing process models. We also present results from applying the algorithm to synthetic data sets as well as process logs obtained from an IBM Flowmark installation.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
R. Agrawal, D. Gunopulos, and F. Leymann. Mining Process Models from Workflow Logs. Research Report RJ 10100 (91916), IBM Almaden Research Center, San Jose, California (available from http://www.almaden.ibm.com/cs/quest), December 1997.
A. V. Aho, M. R. Garey, and J. D. Ullman. The transitive reduction of a directed graph. SIAM Journal of Computing, 1(2), 1972.
Rakesh Agrawal and Ramakrishnan Srikant. Mining Sequential Patterns. In Proc. of the 11th Int'l Conference on Data Engineering, Taipei, Taiwan, March 1995.
P. Attie, M. Singh, E.A. Emerson, A. Sheth, and M. Rusinkiewicz. Scheduling workflows by enforcing intertask dependencies. Distributed Systems Engineering Journal, 3(4):222–238, December 1996.
F. Casati, S. Ceri, B. Pernici, and G. Pozzi. Workflow evolution. In Proceedings of ER' 96, Springer Verlag, Cottbus, Germany, October 1996.
T. Cormen, C. Leiserson, and R. Rivest. Introduction to Algorithms. MIT Press, 1990.
Jonathan E. Cook and Alexander L. Wolf. Automating process discovery through event-data analysis. In Proc. 17th ICSE, Seattle, Washington, USA, April 1995.
Jonathan E. Cook and Alexander L. Wolf. Discovering models of software processes from event-based data. Research Report Technical Report CU-CS-819-96, Computer Science Dept., Univ. of Colorado, 1996.
U. Dayal and M.-C. Shan. Issues in operation flow management for long-running acivities. Data Engineering Bulletin, 16(2):41–44, 1993.
D. Georgakopoulos, M. Hornick, and A. Sheth. An overview of workflow management: Prom process modeling to workflow automation infrastructure. Distributed and Parallel Databases, 3(2), 1995.
D. Georgakopoulos and Marek Rusinkiewicz. Workflow management — from business process automation to inter-organizational collaboration. In VLDB-97 Tutorial, Athens, Greece, August 1997.
D. Hollinsworth. Workflow reference model. Technical report, Workflow Management Coalition, TC00-1003, December 1994.
J. Klein. Advanced rule driven transaction management. In IEEE COMPCON, 1991.
F. Leymann and W. Altenhuber. Managing business processes as an information resource. IBM Systems Journal, (2), 1992.
C. Mohan, G. Alonso, R. Gunthor, and M. Kanath. Exotica: A research perspective on workflow management systems. Data Engineering, 18(1), March 1995.
Heikki Mannila, Hannu Toivonen, and A. Inkeri Verkamo. Discovering frequent episodes in sequences. In Proc. of the 1st Int'l Conference on Knowledge Discovery in Databases and Data Mining, Montreal, Canada, August 1995.
B. Reinwald and H. Wedekind. Automation of control and data flow in distributed application systems. In DEXA, pages 475–481, 1992.
A. L. Scherr. A new approach to business processes. IBM Systems Journal, 32(1), 1993.
Sholom M. Weiss and Casimir A. Kulikowski. Computer Systems that Learn: Classification and Prediction Methods from Statistics, Neural Nets, Machine Learning, and Expert Systems. Morgan Kaufman, 1991.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Agrawal, R., Gunopulos, D., Leymann, F. (1998). Mining process models from workflow logs. In: Schek, HJ., Alonso, G., Saltor, F., Ramos, I. (eds) Advances in Database Technology — EDBT'98. EDBT 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1377. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg . https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0101003
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0101003
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-64264-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69709-1
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive