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Process Mining

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  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Workflow mining

Definition

Process mining techniques allow for the analysis of business processes based on event logs. For example, the audit trails of a workflow management system, the transaction logs of an enterprise resource planning system, and the electronic patient records in a hospital can be used to discover models describing processes, organizations, and products. Moreover, such event logs can also be used to compare event logs with some a priori model to see whether the observed reality conforms to some prescriptive or descriptive model.

The basic idea of process mining is to discover, monitor, and improve real processes (i.e., not assumed processes) by extracting knowledge from event logs [1]. Today many of the activities occurring in processes are either supported or monitored by information systems. Consider, for example, ERP, WFM, CRM, SCM, and PDM systems to support a wide variety of business processes while recording well-structured and detailed event logs....

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Recommended Reading

  1. van der Aalst WMP. Process mining: discovery, conformance and enhancement of business processes. Berlin: Springer; 2011.

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  2. van der Aalst WMP, Weijters AJMM, Maruster L. Workflow mining: discovering process models from event logs. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng. 2004;16(9):1128–42.

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  3. Grigori D, Casati F, Castellanos M, Dayal U, Sayal M, Shan MC. Business process intelligence. Comput Ind. 2004;53(3):321–43.

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  4. Rozinat A, van der Aalst WMP. Conformance checking of processes based on monitoring real behavior. Inf Syst. 2007;33(1):64–95.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    W. M. P. van der Aalst

Authors
  1. W. M. P. van der Aalst
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to W. M. P. van der Aalst .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, GA, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Dept. di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Barbara Pernici

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© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature

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van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2018). Process Mining. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_1477

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