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International Conference on Business Process Management

BPM 2013: Business Process Management Workshops pp 28–40Cite as

Discovering Unbounded Synchronization Conditions in Artifact-Centric Process Models

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 171))

Abstract

Automated process discovery methods aim at extracting business process models from execution logs of information systems. Existing methods in this space are designed to discover synchronization conditions over a set of events that is fixed in number, such as for example discovering that a task should wait for two other tasks to complete. However, they fail to discover synchronization conditions over a variable-sized set of events such as for example that a purchasing decision is made only if at least three out of an a priori undetermined set of quotes have been received. Such synchronization conditions arise in particular in the context of artifact-centric processes, which consist of collections of interacting artifacts, each with its own life cycle. In such processes, an artifact may reach a state in its life cycle where it has to wait for a variable-sized set of artifacts to reach certain states before proceeding. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically discover such synchronization conditions from event logs. The proposed method has been validated over actual event logs of a research grant assessment process.

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Acknowledgment

This research is supported by the EU’s FP7 Program (ACSI Project). Thanks to IWT and Pieter De Leenheer for facilitating the logs used in this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia

    Viara Popova & Marlon Dumas

Authors
  1. Viara Popova
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  2. Marlon Dumas
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marlon Dumas .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Rostock, Rostock, Germany

    Niels Lohmann

  2. Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Ulsan, Korea, Republic of (South Korea)

    Minseok Song

  3. Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden

    Petia Wohed

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Popova, V., Dumas, M. (2014). Discovering Unbounded Synchronization Conditions in Artifact-Centric Process Models. In: Lohmann, N., Song, M., Wohed, P. (eds) Business Process Management Workshops. BPM 2013. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 171. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06257-0_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06257-0_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-06256-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-06257-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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