An agent-based approach for organizational structures and interaction protocols mining in workflow

Abstract

This paper deals with organizational perspective mining in workflow. First, it exposes a comparative study of three representative workflow mining systems: InWolve, WorkflowMiner and ProM. To perform our comparative study, we propose the following quality criteria: the capacity to filter and to convert an events log, the capacity to discover workflow perspectives and the capacity to support their analysis. The main limit of these systems is their inability to deal with organizational perspective mining issue. By organizational perspective, we mean, the social structures defining the activity distribution among actors involved in the workflow (namely federation, coalition, market or hierarchy), as well as the interaction protocols ruling the communications between them (such as contract net, auction or vote). To compensate the previous drawback, the paper proposes an agent-oriented approach to support the organizational perspective mining. More precisely, it proposes an events log model, which extends existing models by taking into account the interactions among actors, thanks to the performative-based agent communication language FIPA-ACL. It also presents a concrete case study to better illustrate the organizational perspective mining and some algorithms for organizational structures and interaction protocols mining. Finally, we describe in detail our discopflow tool to validate our solution.