Incremental Workflow Mining for Process Flexibility

Incremental workflow mining is a technique for automatically deriving a process model from the on-going executions of a process. This way, the process model becomes more and more accurate, and is automatically adapted when the process is being changed. Therefore, incremental workflow mining could help in flexible workflow support: In this paper, we describe a setting that combines incremental workflow mining with gradually increasing the control of a workflow system. Process mining is an active research area. Most of the existing process mining algorithms need a log of the activities resp. the tasks of the process executions. In practice, however, many systems used for executing the processes are not aware of the activities – they see only the documents and how they are changed. Therefore, they do not provide activity logs. In order to make process mining available for this kind of systems, this paper improves an algorithm that identifies the activities from the accesses to documents. We call this algorithm task mining. In combination with our incremental workflow mining approach, task mining makes process mining available for many areas that use document management systems, version management systems or product data management systems. Originally, our incremental workflow mining approach aimed at increasing the maturity level of software enterprises. But, the methods can be applied to any kind of processes that are supported by some kind of system that is aware of documents and document changes during the execution of the processes.