TR2007-072

Workflow Trees for Representation and Mining of Implicitly Concurrent Business Processes
Date:October 2007
MERL Contact:Daniel Nikovski
Author:Daniel Nikovski, Akihiro Baba

We propose a novel representation of business processes called workflow trees that facilitates the mining of process models where the parallel execution of two or more sub-processes has not been recorded explicitly in workflow logs. Based on the provable property of workflow trees that a pair of tasks are siblings in the trees if and only if they have identical respective workflow-log relations with each and every remaining third task in the process, we describe an efficient business process mining algorithm of complexity only cubic in the number of process tasks, and analyze the class of processes that can be identified and reconstructed by it.

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