xPM: A Framework for Process Mining with Exogenous Data

Abstract

AbstractProcess mining facilitates analysis of business processes using event logs derived from historical records of process executions stored in organisations’ information systems. Most existing process mining techniques only consider data directly related to process execution (endogenous data). Data not directly representable as attributes of either events or traces (which includes exogenous data), are generally not considered. Exogenous data may be used by process participants in making decisions about execution paths. However, as exogenous data is not represented in event logs, its impact on such decision making is opaque and cannot currently be assessed by existing process mining techniques. This paper shows how exogenous data can be used in process mining, in particular discovery and enhancement techniques, to understand its influence on process decisions. In particular, we focus on time series which represent periodic observations of e.g. weather measurements, city health alerts or patient vital signs. We show that exogenous time series can be aligned and transformed into new attributes to annotate events in an event log. Then, we use these attributes to discover preconditions in a Petri net with exogenous data (xDPN), thus revealing the exogenous data’s influence on the process. Using our framework and a real-life data set from the medical domain, we evaluate the influence of exogenous data on decision points that are non-deterministic in an xDPN.