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Discovering protocols and organizational structures in workflows

Published: 23 June 2008 Publication History

Abstract

Workflow mining consists in analyzing the execution traces of a collaborative system in order to create a workflow. Most of the works in this area focus on the process discovery from log files, while very few of them address the organization aspect. On the other hand, the Agent technology, suitable for the design and development of cooperative systems, offers interaction languages and high-level protocols allowing the representation of fine-grained organizational structures (hierarchy, federation, coalition, market, among others). In this paper, we show how to enrich log files in order to integrate conversations among the actors of processes using a performative-based agent communication language (FIPA-ACL). This enrichment allows us to define algorithms to discover protocols and organizational structures. The organizational structures are represented by graphs where the nodes are the actors and the arcs relations among them (delegation, cooperation, information exchange, and so on). The interaction protocols (auction, contract net) are described by Petri nets. We provide some discovery algorithms as well as a brief description of a Java implementation coupled with a visualization tool called AGNA.

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  • (2011)Business Process Management under the MicroscopeProceedings of the 2011 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences10.1109/HICSS.2011.93(1-10)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2011

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cover image ACM Conferences
NOTERE '08: Proceedings of the 8th international conference on New technologies in distributed systems
June 2008
399 pages
ISBN:9781595939371
DOI:10.1145/1416729
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • Lyon 1 University
  • SIGAPP: ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing
  • Mairie de Villeurbanne
  • Conseil Général du Rhône
  • INSA Lyon: Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Lyon
  • Conseil Régional Rhône-Alpes
  • Mutuelle d'assurance MAIF
  • I.U.T.A LYON 1: Institute of Technology Lyon 1
  • Ministère de l'Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche
  • Lyon 2 University
  • ISTASE: High-Level Engineering School in Telecommunication
  • France Telecom
  • LIRIS: Lyon Research Center for Images and Intelligent Information Systems

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 June 2008

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Author Tags

  1. agent
  2. organizational structure
  3. petri nets
  4. protocol
  5. workflow mining

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  • (2011)Business Process Management under the MicroscopeProceedings of the 2011 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences10.1109/HICSS.2011.93(1-10)Online publication date: 4-Jan-2011

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