Discovery of process variants based on trace context tree

Abstract

Process variants usually exhibit a high degree of internal heterogeneity, in the sense that the executions of the process differ widely from each other due to contextual factors, human factors, or deliberate business decisions. Understanding differences among process variants helps analysts and managers to make informed decisions as to how to standardise or otherwise improve a business process. Existing process variant mining approaches typically fall short in full supporting semantic process variability mining, especially rarely taking activity behaviour relationships and trace context semantic into consideration. Here, we propose a semantic process variant discovery method, aimed at solving the difficulty of distinguishing similar-but-different behaviours directly from event logs. More specifically, we adapt concepts of benchmark logs and trace context tree to formalise context semantic of event log, to classify benchmark logs into several parts, thereby the clustered trace cohorts are mapped to discover the configurable process variants. In the experimental part, some performance metrics of the proposed method are evaluated and calculated by real-world event logs, supporting the usefulness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed method is able to distinguish similar-but-different behaviours and is superior to the characteristic trace clustering method using conventional neural networks.