Process mining

The basic idea of process mining is to extract knowledge from event logs recorded by an information system. Until recently, the information in these event logs was rarely used to analyze the underlying processes. Process mining aims at improving this by providing techniques and tools for discovering process, control, data, organizational, and social structures from event logs. Fuelled by the omnipresence of event logs in transactional information systems (cf. WFM, ERP, CRM, SCM, and B2B systems), process mining has become a vivid research area.

Many vendors are now pushing technologies such as Business Process Analysis (BPA) and Business Activity Monotoring (BAM). These systems typically aim at basic performance indicators such as cycle time and frequencies. The goal of our work on process mining is to allow for more advanced concepts where knowledge is extracted from logs and causalities can be discovered.

The ProM Tool allows for various types of process mining raging from discovering the control flow to building a social network of the organization. See www.processmining.org for more information.