On the use of domain knowledge for process model repair

Abstract

Process models are important for supporting organizations in documenting, understanding and monitoring their business. When these process models become outdated, they need to be revised to accurately describe the new status quo of the processes in the organization. Process model repair techniques help at automatically revising the existing model from behavior traced in event logs. So far, such techniques have focused on identifying which parts of the model to change and how to change them, but they do not use knowledge from practitioners to inform the revision. As a consequence, fragments of the model may change in a way that defies existing regulations or represents outdated information that was wrongly considered from the event log. This paper uses concepts from theory revision to provide formal foundations for process model repair that exploits domain knowledge. Specifically, it conceptualizes (1) what are unchangeable fragments in the model and (2) the role that various traces in the event log should play when it comes to model repair. A scenario of use is presented that demonstrates the benefits of this conceptualization. The current state of existing process model repair techniques is compared against the proposed concepts. The results show that only two existing techniques partially consider the concepts presented in this paper for model repair.