Control-Flow-Based Querying of Process Executions from Partially Ordered Event Data

Abstract

Event logs, as viewed in process mining, contain event data describing the execution of operational processes. Most process mining techniques take an event log as input and generate insights about the underlying process by analyzing the data provided. Consequently, handling large volumes of event data is essential to apply process mining successfully. Traditionally, individual process executions are considered sequentially ordered process activities. However, process executions are increasingly viewed as partially ordered activities to more accurately reflect process behavior observed in reality, such as simultaneous execution of activities. Process executions comprising partially ordered activities may contain more complex activity patterns than sequence-based process executions. This paper presents a novel query language to call up process executions from event logs containing partially ordered activities. The query language allows users to specify complex ordering relations over activities, i.e., control flow constraints. Evaluating a query for a given log returns process executions satisfying the specified constraints. We demonstrate the implementation of the query language in a process mining tool and evaluate its performance on real-life event logs.