Presentation on the automated discovery of Hybrid Processes, given at the 12th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM2014).

1. The Automated Discovery
of Hybrid Processes
Fabrizio M. Maggi
University of Tartu
Tijs Slaats*
IT University of
Copenhagen
Exformatics
Hajo A. Reijers
VU University of
Amsterdam

2. Overview
• Hybrid Process Models
• Discovering Hybrid Process Models
• Evaluation
• Future Work + Conclusion

3. Imperative Process Models

4. Imperative Process Models
• Flow-oriented
• Well-suited to rigid processes
• In a model with no flow nothing can happen
• Adding flow allows for additional possible
behaviors
• Common in academia and industry

5. Declarative Process Models

6. Declarative Process Models
• Constraint-oriented
• Well-suited to flexible processes
• In an unconstrained model anything can
happen
• Adding constraints limits behavior
• Still a novelty in industry

7. Hybrid Process Models

8. Hybrid Process Models
• Different parts of the same process
may be more or less flexible.
• Modeling a flexible process imperatively,
or a strict process declaratively, often
leads to incomprehensible models.
• Mixing of paradigms on the sub-process level:
– Pockets of flexibility in workflow services [Sadiq et al.]
– Flexibility as a Service (FAAS) [Aalst et al.]

9. Process Discovery
Event
Log
Process Model

10. Process Discovery
• Current discovery techniques:
– Mining Petri-nets / Flowcharts
• Alpha miner, Heuristic Miner, ILP miner, …
– Mining Declarative constraints
• Declare miner
• But what if the log contains both flexible and rigid
parts?
– Imperative miners tend to blow-up on flexible logs
– Declarative miners will need to find many constraints to
model the strict parts of the process and will often have
trouble finding all of them (resulting in processes with low
precision)
• Solution: Hybrid Process Discovery!

11. Hybrid Process Discovery
Context
analysis
Clustering
(based on
context analysis)
Clustering
(association rule
mining)
Standard
Process
Discovery
Declare
Discovery
String Edit
Distance

12. Evaluation – BPI Challenge 2012
Results of Imperative Miners

13. Evaluation – BPI Challenge 2012
Result of Hybrid Miner

14. Evaluation – BPI Challenge 2012
Comparison of Results
Fitness
Size

15. Future Work
• Proper plugin for Prom.
• Visualization of resulting hybrid model.
• Further evaluation on real cases.
• Further refinement of the heuristics used in
the approach, for example the thresholds
used for determining if an event is structured
or unstructured.

16. Conclusion
• We offer the first automated approach for
discovering hybrid process models.
• Using the approach on existing logs gives
encouraging results: in particular for semi-structured
logs the discovered models
become more readable.
• Plenty of room for future work in an exciting
new angle on process mining.