Hierarchy Process Mining from Multi-Source Logs

Abstract

Nowadays, large-scale business processes is growing rapidly; in this regards process mining is required to discover and enhance business processes in different departments of an organization. A process mining algorithm can generally discover the process model of an organization without considering the detailed process models of the departments, and the relationship among departments. The exchange of messages among departments can produce asynchronous activities among department process models. The event logs from departments can be considered as multi-source logs, which cause difficulties in mining the process model. Discovering process models from multi-source logs is still in the state of the art, therefore this paper proposes a hierarchy high-to-low process mining approach to discover the process model from a complex multi-source and heterogeneous event logs collected from distributed departments. The proposed method involves three steps; i.e. firstly a high level process model is developed; secondly a separate low level process model is discovered from multi-source logs; finally the Petri net refinement operation is used to integrate the discovered process models. The refinement operation replaced the abctract transitions of a high level process model with the corresponding low level process models. Multi-source event logs from several departments of a yarn manufacturing were used in the computational study, and the results showed that the proposed method combined with the modified time-based heuristics miner could discover a correct parallel process business model containing XOR, AND, and OR relations.