Artem Polyvyanyy

Zahra Dasht Bozorgi, Marlon Dumas, Marcello La Rosa et al.

Increasing the success rate of a process, i.e. the percentage of cases that end in a positive outcome, is a recurrent process improvement goal. At runtime, there are often certain actions (a.k.a. treatments) that workers may execute to lift the probability that a case ends in a positive outcome. For example, in a loan origination process, a possible treatment is to issue multiple loan offers to increase the probability that the customer takes a loan. Each treatment has a cost. Thus, when defining policies for prescribing treatments to cases, managers need to consider the net gain of the treatments. Also, the effect of a treatment varies over time: treating a case earlier may be more effective than later in a case. This paper presents a prescriptive monitoring method that automates this decision-making task. The method combines causal inference and reinforcement learning to learn treatment policies that maximize the net gain. The method leverages a conformal prediction technique to speed up the convergence of the reinforcement learning mechanism by separating cases that are likely to end up in a positive or negative outcome, from uncertain cases. An evaluation on two real-life datasets shows that the proposed method outperforms a state-of-the-art baseline.

Diego Calvanese, Angelo Casciani, Giuseppe De Giacomo et al. · oxford

This paper presents a manifesto that articulates the conceptual foundations of Agentic Business Process Management (APM), an extension of Business Process Management (BPM) for governing autonomous agents executing processes in organizations. From a management perspective, APM represents a paradigm shift from the traditional process view of the business process, driven by the realization of process awareness and an agent-oriented abstraction, where software and human agents act as primary functional entities that perceive, reason, and act within explicit process frames. This perspective marks a shift from traditional, automation-oriented BPM toward systems in which autonomy is constrained, aligned, and made operational through process awareness. We introduce the core abstractions and architectural elements required to realize APM systems and elaborate on four key capabilities that such APM agents must support: framed autonomy, explainability, conversational actionability, and self-modification. These capabilities jointly ensure that agents' goals are aligned with organizational goals and that agents behave in a framed yet proactive manner in pursuing those goals. We discuss the extent to which the capabilities can be realized and identify research challenges whose resolution requires further advances in BPM, AI, and multi-agent systems. The manifesto thus serves as a roadmap for bridging these communities and for guiding the development of APM systems in practice.

Jan Martijn E. M. van der Werf, Andrey Rivkin, Marco Montali et al.

A model of an information system describes its processes and how resources are involved in these processes to manipulate data objects. This paper presents an extension to the Petri nets formalism suitable for describing information systems in which states refer to object instances of predefined types and resources are identified as instances of special object types. Several correctness criteria for resource- and object-aware information systems models are proposed, supplemented with discussions on their decidability for interesting classes of systems. These new correctness criteria can be seen as generalizations of the classical soundness property of workflow models concerned with process control flow correctness.

Zihang Su, Tianshi Yu, Nir Lipovetzky et al.

A transhumeral prosthesis restores missing anatomical segments below the shoulder, including the hand. Active prostheses utilize real-valued, continuous sensor data to recognize patient target poses, or goals, and proactively move the artificial limb. Previous studies have examined how well the data collected in stationary poses, without considering the time steps, can help discriminate the goals. In this case study paper, we focus on using time series data from surface electromyography electrodes and kinematic sensors to sequentially recognize patients' goals. Our approach involves transforming the data into discrete events and training an existing process mining-based goal recognition system. Results from data collected in a virtual reality setting with ten subjects demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed goal recognition approach, which achieves significantly better precision and recall than the state-of-the-art machine learning techniques and is less confident when wrong, which is beneficial when approximating smoother movements of prostheses.

Tian Li, Artem Polyvyanyy, Sander J. J. Leemans

Process mining leverages event data extracted from IT systems to generate insights into the business processes of organizations. Such insights benefit from explicitly considering the frequency of behavior in business processes, which is captured by stochastic process models. Given an observed trace and a stochastic process model, conventional alignment-based conformance checking techniques face a fundamental limitation: They prioritize matching the trace to a model path with minimal deviations, which may, however, lead to selecting an unlikely path. In this paper, we study the problem of matching an observed trace to a stochastic process model by identifying a likely model path with a low edit distance to the trace. We phrase this as an optimization problem and develop a heuristic-guided path-finding algorithm to solve it. Our open-source implementation demonstrates the feasibility of the approach and shows that it can provide new, useful diagnostic insights for analysts.

Hanan Alkhammash, Artem Polyvyanyy, Alistair Moffat

Starting with a collection of traces generated by process executions, process discovery is the task of constructing a simple model that describes the process, where simplicity is often measured in terms of model size. The challenge of process discovery is that the process of interest is unknown, and that while the input traces constitute positive examples of process executions, no negative examples are available. Many commercial tools discover Directly-Follows Graphs, in which nodes represent the observable actions of the process, and directed arcs indicate execution order possibilities over the actions. We propose a new approach for discovering sound Directly-Follows Graphs that is grounded in grammatical inference over the input traces. To promote the discovery of small graphs that also describe the process accurately we design and evaluate a genetic algorithm that supports the convergence of the inference parameters to the areas that lead to the discovery of interesting models. Experiments over real-world datasets confirm that our new approach can construct smaller models that represent the input traces and their frequencies more accurately than the state-of-the-art technique. Reasoning over the frequencies of encoded traces also becomes possible, due to the stochastic semantics of the action graphs we propose, which, for the first time, are interpreted as models that describe the stochastic languages of action traces.

Aurélie Leribaux, Rafael Oyamada, Johannes De Smedt et al.

Understanding how actor behavior influences process outcomes is a critical aspect of process mining. Traditional approaches often use aggregate and static process data, overlooking the temporal and causal dynamics that arise from individual actor behavior. This limits the ability to accurately capture the complexity of real-world processes, where individual actor behavior and interactions between actors significantly shape performance. In this work, we address this gap by integrating actor behavior analysis with Granger causality to identify correlating links in time series data. We apply this approach to realworld event logs, constructing time series for actor interactions, i.e. continuation, interruption, and handovers, and process outcomes. Using Group Lasso for lag selection, we identify a small but consistently influential set of lags that capture the majority of causal influence, revealing that actor behavior has direct and measurable impacts on process performance, particularly throughput time. These findings demonstrate the potential of actor-centric, time series-based methods for uncovering the temporal dependencies that drive process outcomes, offering a more nuanced understanding of how individual behaviors impact overall process efficiency.

Aurelie Leribaux, Rafael Oyamada, Johannes De Smedt et al.

Predictive Process Monitoring (PPM) is a key task in Process Mining that aims to predict future behavior, outcomes, or performance indicators. Accurate prediction of the latter is critical for proactive decision-making. Given that processes are often resource-driven, understanding and incorporating actor behavior in forecasting is crucial. Although existing research has incorporated aspects of actor behavior, its role as a time-varying signal in PPM remains limited. This study investigates whether incorporating actor behavior information, modeled as time series, can improve the predictive performance of throughput time (TT) forecasting models. Using real-life event logs, we construct multivariate time series that include TT alongside actor-centric features, i.e., actor involvement, the frequency of continuation, interruption, and handover behaviors, and the duration of these behaviors. We train and compare several models to study the benefits of adding actor behavior. The results show that actor-enriched models consistently outperform baseline models, which only include TT features, in terms of RMSE, MAE, and R2. These findings demonstrate that modeling actor behavior over time and incorporating this information into forecasting models enhances performance indicator predictions.

Wenjun Zhou, Artem Polyvyanyy, James Bailey

Process mining, a data-driven approach for analyzing, visualizing, and improving business processes using event logs, has emerged as a powerful technique in the field of business process management. Process forecasting is a sub-field of process mining that studies how to predict future processes and process models. In this paper, we introduce and motivate the problem of event log prediction and present our approach to solving the event log prediction problem, in particular, using the sequence-to-sequence deep learning approach. We evaluate and analyze the prediction outcomes on a variety of synthetic logs and seven real-life logs and show that our approach can generate perfect predictions on synthetic logs and that deep learning techniques have the potential to be applied in real-world event log prediction tasks. We further provide practical recommendations for event log predictions grounded in the outcomes of the conducted experiments.

Timotheus Kampik, Christian Warmuth, Adrian Rebmann et al.

The continued success of Large Language Models (LLMs) and other generative artificial intelligence approaches highlights the advantages that large information corpora can have over rigidly defined symbolic models, but also serves as a proof-point of the challenges that purely statistics-based approaches have in terms of safety and trustworthiness. As a framework for contextualizing the potential, as well as the limitations of LLMs and other foundation model-based technologies, we propose the concept of a Large Process Model (LPM) that combines the correlation power of LLMs with the analytical precision and reliability of knowledge-based systems and automated reasoning approaches. LPMs are envisioned to directly utilize the wealth of process management experience that experts have accumulated, as well as process performance data of organizations with diverse characteristics, e.g.,\ regarding size, region, or industry. In this vision, the proposed LPM would allow organizations to receive context-specific (tailored) process and other business models, analytical deep-dives, and improvement recommendations. As such, they would allow to substantially decrease the time and effort required for business transformation, while also allowing for deeper, more impactful, and more actionable insights than previously possible. We argue that implementing an LPM is feasible, but also highlight limitations and research challenges that need to be solved to implement particular aspects of the LPM vision.

Artem Polyvyanyy, Alistair Moffat, Luciano García-Bañuelos

Process mining extracts value from the traces recorded in the event logs of IT-systems, with process discovery the task of inferring a process model for a log emitted by some unknown system. Generalization is one of the quality criteria applied to process models to quantify how well the model describes future executions of the system. Generalization is also perhaps the least understood of those criteria, with that lack primarily a consequence of it measuring properties over the entire future behavior of the system when the only available sample of behavior is that provided by the log. In this paper, we apply a bootstrap approach from computational statistics, allowing us to define an estimator of the model's generalization based on the log it was discovered from. We show that standard process mining assumptions lead to a consistent estimator that makes fewer errors as the quality of the log increases. Experiments confirm the ability of the approach to support industry-scale data-driven systems engineering.

Anna Kalenkova, Josep Carmona, Artem Polyvyanyy et al.

State-of-the-art process discovery methods construct free-choice process models from event logs. Consequently, the constructed models do not take into account indirect dependencies between events. Whenever the input behaviour is not free-choice, these methods fail to provide a precise model. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for enhancing free-choice process models by adding non-free-choice constructs discovered a-posteriori via region-based techniques. This allows us to benefit from the performance of existing process discovery methods and the accuracy of the employed fundamental synthesis techniques. We prove that the proposed approach preserves fitness with respect to the event log while improving the precision when indirect dependencies exist. The approach has been implemented and tested on both synthetic and real-life datasets. The results show its effectiveness in repairing models discovered from event logs.

Volodymyr Leno, Adriano Augusto, Marlon Dumas et al.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology to automate routine work such as copying data across applications or filling in document templates using data from multiple applications. RPA tools allow organizations to automate a wide range of routines. However, identifying and scoping routines that can be automated using RPA tools is time consuming. Manual identification of candidate routines via interviews, walk-throughs, or job shadowing allow analysts to identify the most visible routines, but these methods are not suitable when it comes to identifying the long tail of routines in an organization. This article proposes an approach to discover automatable routines from logs of user interactions with IT systems and to synthesize executable specifications for such routines. The approach starts by discovering frequent routines at a control-flow level (candidate routines). It then determines which of these candidate routines are automatable and it synthetizes an executable specification for each such routine. Finally, it identifies semantically equivalent routines so as to produce a set of non-redundant automatable routines. The article reports on an evaluation of the approach using a combination of synthetic and real-life logs. The evaluation results show that the approach can discover automatable routines that are known to be present in a UI log, and that it identifies automatable routines that users recognize as such in real-life logs.

Zahra Dasht Bozorgi, Irene Teinemaa, Marlon Dumas et al.

Reducing cycle time is a recurrent concern in the field of business process management. Depending on the process, various interventions may be triggered to reduce the cycle time of a case, for example, using a faster shipping service in an order-to-delivery process or giving a phone call to a customer to obtain missing information rather than waiting passively. Each of these interventions comes with a cost. This paper tackles the problem of determining if and when to trigger a time-reducing intervention in a way that maximizes the total net gain. The paper proposes a prescriptive process monitoring method that uses orthogonal random forest models to estimate the causal effect of triggering a time-reducing intervention for each ongoing case of a process. Based on this causal effect estimate, the method triggers interventions according to a user-defined policy. The method is evaluated on two real-life logs.

Johannes De Smedt, Anton Yeshchenko, Artem Polyvyanyy et al.

Process analytics is an umbrella of data-driven techniques which includes making predictions for individual process instances or overall process models. At the instance level, various novel techniques have been recently devised, tackling next activity, remaining time, and outcome prediction. At the model level, there is a notable void. It is the ambition of this paper to fill this gap. To this end, we develop a technique to forecast the entire process model from historical event data. A forecasted model is a will-be process model representing a probable future state of the overall process. Such a forecast helps to investigate the consequences of drift and emerging bottlenecks. Our technique builds on a representation of event data as multiple time series, each capturing the evolution of a behavioural aspect of the process model, such that corresponding forecasting techniques can be applied. Our implementation demonstrates the accuracy of our technique on real-world event log data.

Jan Martijn E. M. van der Werf, Artem Polyvyanyy, Bart R. van Wensveen et al.

The aim of a process discovery algorithm is to construct from event data a process model that describes the underlying, real-world process well. Intuitively, the better the quality of the event data, the better the quality of the model that is discovered. However, existing process discovery algorithms do not guarantee this relationship. We demonstrate this by using a range of quality measures for both event data and discovered process models. This paper is a call to the community of IS engineers to complement their process discovery algorithms with properties that relate qualities of their inputs to those of their outputs. To this end, we distinguish four incremental stages for the development of such algorithms, along with concrete guidelines for the formulation of relevant properties and experimental validation. We will also use these stages to reflect on the state of the art, which shows the need to move forward in our thinking about algorithmic process discovery.

Anton Yeshchenko, Claudio Di Ciccio, Jan Mendling et al.

Event sequence data is increasingly available in various application domains, such as business process management, software engineering, or medical pathways. Processes in these domains are typically represented as process diagrams or flow charts. So far, various techniques have been developed for automatically generating such diagrams from event sequence data. An open challenge is the visual analysis of drift phenomena when processes change over time. In this paper, we address this research gap. Our contribution is a system for fine-granular process drift detection and corresponding visualizations for event logs of executed business processes. We evaluated our system both on synthetic and real-world data. On synthetic logs, we achieved an average F-score of 0.96 and outperformed all the state-of-the-art methods. On real-world logs, we identified all types of process drifts in a comprehensive manner. Finally, we conducted a user study highlighting that our visualizations are easy to use and useful as perceived by process mining experts. In this way, our work contributes to research on process mining, event sequence analysis, and visualization of temporal data.

Zahra Dasht Bozorgi, Irene Teinemaa, Marlon Dumas et al.

This paper proposes an approach to analyze an event log of a business process in order to generate case-level recommendations of treatments that maximize the probability of a given outcome. Users classify the attributes in the event log into controllable and non-controllable, where the former correspond to attributes that can be altered during an execution of the process (the possible treatments). We use an action rule mining technique to identify treatments that co-occur with the outcome under some conditions. Since action rules are generated based on correlation rather than causation, we then use a causal machine learning technique, specifically uplift trees, to discover subgroups of cases for which a treatment has a high causal effect on the outcome after adjusting for confounding variables. We test the relevance of this approach using an event log of a loan application process and compare our findings with recommendations manually produced by process mining experts.

Artem Polyvyanyy, Hanan Alkhammash, Claudio Di Ciccio et al.

This paper presents a command-line tool, called Entropia, that implements a family of conformance checking measures for process mining founded on the notion of entropy from information theory. The measures allow quantifying classical non-deterministic and stochastic precision and recall quality criteria for process models automatically discovered from traces executed by IT-systems and recorded in their event logs. A process model has "good" precision with respect to the log it was discovered from if it does not encode many traces that are not part of the log, and has "good" recall if it encodes most of the traces from the log. By definition, the measures possess useful properties and can often be computed quickly.

Artem Polyvyanyy, Alistair Moffat, Luciano García-Bañuelos

Given an event log as a collection of recorded real-world process traces, process mining aims to automatically construct a process model that is both simple and provides a useful explanation of the traces. Conformance checking techniques are then employed to characterize and quantify commonalities and discrepancies between the log's traces and the candidate models. Recent approaches to conformance checking acknowledge that the elements being compared are inherently stochastic - for example, some traces occur frequently and others infrequently - and seek to incorporate this knowledge in their analyses. Here we present an entropic relevance measure for stochastic conformance checking, computed as the average number of bits required to compress each of the log's traces, based on the structure and information about relative likelihoods provided by the model. The measure penalizes traces from the event log not captured by the model and traces described by the model but absent in the event log, thus addressing both precision and recall quality criteria at the same time. We further show that entropic relevance is computable in time linear in the size of the log, and provide evaluation outcomes that demonstrate the feasibility of using the new approach in industrial settings.

Volodymyr Leno, Marlon Dumas, Marcello La Rosa et al.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology for automating repetitive routines consisting of sequences of user interactions with one or more applications. In order to fully exploit the opportunities opened by RPA, companies need to discover which specific routines may be automated, and how. In this setting, this paper addresses the problem of analyzing User Interaction (UI) logs in order to discover routines where a user transfers data from one spreadsheet or (Web) form to another. The paper maps this problem to that of discovering data transformations by example - a problem for which several techniques are available. The paper shows that a naive application of a state-of-the-art technique for data transformation discovery is computationally inefficient. Accordingly, the paper proposes two optimizations that take advantage of the information in the UI log and the fact that data transfers across applications typically involve copying alphabetic and numeric tokens separately. The proposed approach and its optimizations are evaluated using UI logs that replicate a real-life repetitive data transfer routine.

Artem Polyvyanyy, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede, Marcello La Rosa et al.

Organizations can benefit from the use of practices, techniques, and tools from the area of business process management. Through the focus on processes, they create process models that require management, including support for versioning, refactoring and querying. Querying thus far has primarily focused on structural properties of models rather than on exploiting behavioral properties capturing aspects of model execution. While the latter is more challenging, it is also more effective, especially when models are used for auditing or process automation. The focus of this paper is to overcome the challenges associated with behavioral querying of process models in order to unlock its benefits. The first challenge concerns determining decidability of the building blocks of the query language, which are the possible behavioral relations between process tasks. The second challenge concerns achieving acceptable performance of query evaluation. The evaluation of a query may require expensive checks in all process models, of which there may be thousands. In light of these challenges, this paper proposes a special-purpose programming language, namely Process Query Language (PQL) for behavioral querying of process model collections. The language relies on a set of behavioral predicates between process tasks, whose usefulness has been empirically evaluated with a pool of process model stakeholders. This study resulted in a selection of the predicates to be implemented in PQL, whose decidability has also been formally proven. The computational performance of the language has been extensively evaluated through a set of experiments against two large process model collections.

Anton Yeshchenko, Claudio Di Ciccio, Jan Mendling et al.

Recent research has introduced ideas from concept drift into process mining to enable the analysis of changes in business processes over time. This stream of research, however, has not yet addressed the challenges of drift categorization, drilling-down, and quantification. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for managing process drifts, called Visual Drift Detection (VDD), which fulfills these requirements. The technique starts by clustering declarative process constraints discovered from recorded logs of executed business processes based on their similarity and then applies change point detection on the identified clusters to detect drifts. VDD complements these features with detailed visualizations and explanations of drifts. Our evaluation, both on synthetic and real-world logs, demonstrates all the aforementioned capabilities of the technique.