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Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency VII pp 372–422Cite as

Discovering Petri Nets from Event Logs

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((TOPNOC,volume 7480))

Abstract

As information systems are becoming more and more intertwined with the operational processes they support, multitudes of events are recorded by today’s information systems. The goal of process mining is to use such event data to extract process related information, e.g., to automatically discover a process model by observing events recorded by some system or to check the conformance of a given model by comparing it with reality. In this article, we focus on process discovery, i.e., extracting a process model from an event log. We focus on Petri nets as a representation language, because of the concurrent and unstructured nature of real-life processes. The goal is to introduce several approaches to discover Petri nets from event data (notably the α-algorithm, state-based regions, and language-based regions). Moreover, important requirements for process discovery are discussed. For example, process mining is only meaningful if one can deal with incompleteness (only a fraction of all possible behavior is observed) and noise (one would like to abstract from infrequent random behavior). These requirements reveal significant challenges for future research in this domain.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Wil M. P. van der Aalst & Boudewijn F. van Dongen

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  1. Wil M. P. van der Aalst
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  2. Boudewijn F. van Dongen
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Science, Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus, IT-parken, Aabogade 34, 8200, Aarhus N, Denmark

    Kurt Jensen

  2. Department of Information Systems, Eindhoven University of Technology, P.O. Box 513, NL-5600, Eindhoven, MB, The Netherlands

    Wil M. P. van der Aalst

  3. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Torino, Corso Svizzera 185, 10149, Torino, Italy

    Gianfranco Balbo

  4. School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Maciej Koutny

  5. Institut für Informatik, Universität Rostock, Germany

    Karsten Wolf

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van der Aalst, W.M.P., van Dongen, B.F. (2013). Discovering Petri Nets from Event Logs. In: Jensen, K., van der Aalst, W.M.P., Balbo, G., Koutny, M., Wolf, K. (eds) Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency VII. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7480. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38143-0_10

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