Process Mining and Monitoring Processes and Services: Workshop Report

In a service-oriented architecture, but also in classical entreprise systems, a variety of events (e.g., messages being sent and received) are being logged. This information can be used for process mining purposes, i.e., based on some event log it is possible to discover processes or to check conformance. The goal of process discovery is to build models without a-priori knowledge, i.e., based on sequences of events one can look for the presence or absence of certain patterns and deduce some process model from it. For conformance checking there has to be an initial model. One can think of this model as a “contract” or “specification” and it is interesting to see whether the parties involved stick to this model. Using conformance checking it is possible to quantify the fit (fewer deviations result in a better fit) and to locate “problem areas” where a lot of deviations take place. One of the four workshops organized within the context of the Dagstuhl seminar on The Role of Business Processes in Service Oriented Architectures (Seminar 06291, 16.07.2006-21.07.2006) was a Workshop on Process Mining and Monitoring Processes and Services. In this paper, we report on the results of the workshop.