Recursion Aware Modeling and Discovery For Hierarchical Software Event Log Analysis (Extended)
This work addresses the challenge of understanding complex software operational processes for developers and analysts, offering an incremental improvement by integrating hierarchical information into existing process mining methods.
The paper tackles the problem of analyzing hierarchical and recursive structures in software event logs by introducing a novel extension to process tree models and the first recursion-aware process model discovery technique, demonstrating feasibility and significant speed-up potential in experiments with real-life logs.
This extended paper presents 1) a novel hierarchy and recursion extension to the process tree model; and 2) the first, recursion aware process model discovery technique that leverages hierarchical information in event logs, typically available for software systems. This technique allows us to analyze the operational processes of software systems under real-life conditions at multiple levels of granularity. The work can be positioned in-between reverse engineering and process mining. An implementation of the proposed approach is available as a ProM plugin. Experimental results based on real-life (software) event logs demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the approach and show the huge potential to speed up discovery by exploiting the available hierarchy.