Learning Accurate Business Process Simulation Models from Event Logs via Automated Process Discovery and Deep Learning
This is an incremental improvement for business process analysts, enabling more accurate simulations while partially maintaining interpretability for scenario testing.
The paper tackles the problem of accurately simulating business processes for what-if analysis by combining data-driven simulation (DDS) with deep learning (DL) to capture temporal dynamics while retaining some what-if analysis capability, resulting in hybrid models that match the temporal accuracy of pure DL models.
Business process simulation is a well-known approach to estimate the impact of changes to a process with respect to time and cost measures -- a practice known as what-if process analysis. The usefulness of such estimations hinges on the accuracy of the underlying simulation model. Data-Driven Simulation (DDS) methods leverage process mining techniques to learn process simulation models from event logs. Empirical studies have shown that, while DDS models adequately capture the observed sequences of activities and their frequencies, they fail to accurately capture the temporal dynamics of real-life processes. In contrast, generative Deep Learning (DL) models are better able to capture such temporal dynamics. The drawback of DL models is that users cannot alter them for what-if analysis due to their black-box nature. This paper presents a hybrid approach to learn process simulation models from event logs wherein a (stochastic) process model is extracted via DDS techniques, and then combined with a DL model to generate timestamped event sequences. An experimental evaluation shows that the resulting hybrid simulation models match the temporal accuracy of pure DL models, while partially retaining the what-if analysis capability of DDS approaches.