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Encoding process discovery problems in SMT

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Abstract

Information systems, which are responsible for driving many processes in our lives (health care, the web, municipalities, commerce and business, among others), store information in the form of logs which is often left unused. Process mining, a discipline in between data mining and software engineering, proposes tailored algorithms to exploit the information stored in a log, in order to reason about the processes underlying an information system. A key challenge in process mining is discovery: Given a log, derive a formal process model that can be used afterward for a formal analysis. In this paper, we provide a general approach based on satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) as a solution for this challenging problem. By encoding the problem into the logical/arithmetic domains and using modern SMT engines, it is shown how two separate families of process models can be discovered. The theory of this paper is accompanied with a tool, and experimental results witness the significance of this novel view of the process discovery problem.

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Notes

  1. Notice that depending on the notion of valid sequence, the notion of undesired behavior may vary. For instance, for certain formalisms, only complete sequences (i.e., sequences from start to end) may be considered. For the sake of generality, we opt to abstracting from these matters in Algorithm 2.

  2. In this case if previous iterations of the algorithm were only due to forbidding \(\sigma \) on other parts of the model, these modifications could in principle be rolled back.

  3. Remarkably, the SMT technique proposed can be applied individually to every trace of the log, which allows to independently solve the problem when complexity issues may arise.

  4. Although the minimum number of arcs required to guarantee that all activities are connected is \(|A|-1\), the minimum bound in the algorithm is set to |A|. This is because there is a single model that has \(|A|-1\) arcs, which corresponds to a sequence of activities. If this model is feasible, then it should have been already found in \(C_{\text {IF}}(L)\), thus \(\left| \mathrm arcs(C)\right| = |A|-1\) and the algorithm would never enter the loop and return \(C_{\text {IF}}(L)\). On the other hand, if \(\left| \mathrm arcs(C)\right| > |A|-1\), then there is no feasible model with just \(|A|-1\) arcs; thus, the minimum search bound can be set to |A|.

  5. One can notice this with the simple example of Fig. 2b: To replay the occurrence of activity a, the three output bindings should be considered as potential successor states, in general to proceed with the replay any of them can be combined with the occurrences of the sequent activities, which in turn may introduce new output binding possibilities.

  6. For instance, \(z = x \vee y\) is equivalent to \(z \ge x\), \(z \ge y\) and \(z \le x+y\).

  7. This is indeed a region, since the gradient of every event is constant and equal to zero.

  8. Testing minimality of model elements is a feature not considered in Algorithm 3, and this is the reason why the generic algorithm (Algorithm 3) and the instantiation (Algorithm 5) have a different structure.

  9. STP translates the SMT formula to a SAT formula and then uses the miniSAT solver, but any other SAT (or incremental SAT) tool can be used as backend.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been partially supported by funds from the Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) and the European Union (FEDER funds) under Grant COMMAS (Ref. TIN2013-46181-C2-1-R).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CA Strategic Research, CA Technologies, Barcelona, Spain

    Marc Solé

  2. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Josep Carmona

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  1. Marc Solé
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  2. Josep Carmona
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Correspondence to Josep Carmona.

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Communicated by Dr. Daniel Varro.

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Solé, M., Carmona, J. Encoding process discovery problems in SMT. Softw Syst Model 17, 1055–1078 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-016-0536-y

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