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Automatic Extraction of Process Control Flow from I/O Operations

  • Conference paper
Business Process Management (BPM 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 5240))

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Abstract

Many end users will expect the output of process mining to be a model they can easily understand. On the other hand, knowing which objects were accessed in each operation can be a valuable input for process discovery. From these two trends it is possible to establish an analogy between process mining and the discovery of program structure. In this paper we present an approach for extracting process control-flow from a trace of read and write operations over a set of objects. The approach is divided in two independent phases. In the first phase, Fourier analysis is used to identify periodic behavior that can be represented with loop constructs. In the second phase, a match-and-merge technique is used to produce a control-flow graph capable of generating the input trace and thus representing the process that generated it. The combination of these techniques provides a structured and compact representation of the unknown process, with very good results in terms of conformance metrics.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. IST/INESC-ID, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal

    Pedro C. Diniz

  2. IST/INOV, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal

    Diogo R. Ferreira

Authors
  1. Pedro C. Diniz
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  2. Diogo R. Ferreira
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Tartu, J Liivi 2, 50409, Tartu, Estonia

    Marlon Dumas

  2. Department of Computer Science, Information Systems Group, University of Twente, P.O. Box 217, 7500 AE, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Manfred Reichert

  3. SAP Labs, LLC 3475 Deer Creek Road, CA 94304, Palo Alto, USA

    Ming-Chien Shan

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Diniz, P.C., Ferreira, D.R. (2008). Automatic Extraction of Process Control Flow from I/O Operations. In: Dumas, M., Reichert, M., Shan, MC. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5240. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85758-7_25

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-85758-7_25

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-85757-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-85758-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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