Workflow Mining: Discovering process models from event logs W.M.P. van der Aalst1,2, A.J.M.M. Weijters1, and L. Maruster1 1 Department of Technology Management, Eindhoven University of Technology P.O. Box 513, NL-5600 MB, Eindhoven, The Netherlands.
[email protected] 2 Centre for Information Technology Innovation, Queensland University of Technology P.O. Box 2434, Brisbane Qld 4001, Australia. Abstract. Contemporary workflow management systems are driven by explicit process models, i.e., a completely specified workflow design is required in order to enact a given workflow process. Creating a workflow design is a complicated time-consuming process and typically there are discrepancies between the actual workflow processes and the processes as perceived by the management. Therefore, we have developed techniques for discovering workflow models. Starting point for such techniques is a so-called “workflow log” containing information about the workflow process as it is actually being executed. We present a new algorithm to extract a process model from such a log and represent it in terms of a Petri net. However, we will also demonstrate that it is not possible to discover arbitrary workflow processes. In this paper we explore a class of workflow processes that can be discovered. We show that the α-algorithm can successfully mine any workflow represented by a so-called SWF-net. Key words: Workflow mining, Workflow management, Data mining, Petri nets. 1 Introduction During the last decade workflow management concepts and tech- nology[4, 6, 15, 26, 28] have been applied in manyenterprise infor- mation systems.