Process discovery and Petri nets

Abstract

The aim of the research domain known as process mining is to use process discovery to construct a process model as an abstract representation of event logs. The goal is to build a model (in terms of a Petri net) that can reproduce the logs under consideration, and does not allow different behaviours compared with those shown in the logs. In particular, process mining aims to verify the accuracy of the model design (represented as a Petri net), basically checking whether the same net can be rediscovered. However, the main mining methods proposed in the literature have some drawbacks: the classical α-algorithm is unable to rediscover various nets, while the region-based approach, which can mine them correctly, is too complex.In this paper, we compare different approaches and propose some ideas to counter the weaknesses of the region-based approach.