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Shape Your Process: Discovering Declarative Business Processes from Positive and Negative Traces Taking into Account User Preferences

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Enterprise Design, Operations, and Computing (EDOC 2022)

Abstract

Process discovery techniques focus on learning a process model starting from a given set of logged traces. The majority of the discovery approaches, however, only consider one set of examples to learn from, i.e., the log itself. Some recent works on declarative process discovery, instead, advocated the usefulness of taking into account two different sets of traces (a.k.a. positive and negative examples), with the goal of learning a set of constraints that is able to discriminate which trace belongs to which set. Sometimes, however, too many possible sets of constraints might be available, thus nullifying the discovery effort. Therefore, some preference criteria would be helpful to guide the discovery process towards a set of constraints among the many. In this work, we present an approach for the discovery of declarative models providing the possibility, from the user viewpoint, of specifying preferences on activities and constraint templates to be used to build the final set of constraints. Such preferences are used to guide the discovery process, so that the output set will include, if possible, the preferred constraints, thus exploiting some expert knowledge about the desired outcome. The approach is grounded in a logic-based framework that provides a sound and formal meaning to the notion of expert preferences.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Roughly speaking, two models are equivalent if they accept and reject the same traces. Such a notion of equivalence hints to the possibility that given two models \(M_1\) and \(M_2\), opting for the former or the latter will not change which traces will be accepted or rejected.

  2. 2.

    Other models exist, of course, but, for the sake of clarity, we only mention two of them.

  3. 3.

    The file declare_rules.txt can be found in the data directory.

  4. 4.

    For reproducibility purposes the source code is available in [42], the DREYERS event log can be found in [17, 39], while the CERV event log is a proprietary dataset.

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Acknowledgments.

This work has been partially supported by the European Union’s H2020 projects HumaneAI-Net (g.a. 952026), StairwAI (g.a. 101017142), and TAILOR (g.a. 952215).

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Correspondence to Federico Chesani .

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Chesani, F. et al. (2022). Shape Your Process: Discovering Declarative Business Processes from Positive and Negative Traces Taking into Account User Preferences. In: Almeida, J.P.A., Karastoyanova, D., Guizzardi, G., Montali, M., Maggi, F.M., Fonseca, C.M. (eds) Enterprise Design, Operations, and Computing. EDOC 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13585. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17604-3_13

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