Abstract
Declarative business process discovery aims at identifying sets of constraints, from a given formal language, that characterise a workflow by using pre-recorded activity logs. Since the provided logs represent a fraction of all the consistent evolution of a process, and the fact that many sets of constraints covering those examples can be selected, empirical criteria should be employed to identify the “best” candidates. In our work we frame the process discovery as an optimisation problem, where we want to identify optimal sets of constraints according to preference criteria. Declarative constraints for processes are usually characterised via temporal logics, so different solutions can be semantically equivalent. For this reason, it is difficult to use an arbitrary finite domain constraints solvers for the optimisation. The use of Answer Set Programming enables the combination of deduction rules within the optimisation algorithm, in order to take into account not only the user preferences but also the implicit semantics of the formal language. In this paper we show how we encoded the process discovery problem using the ASPrin framework for qualitative and quantitative optimisation in ASP, and the results of our experiments.
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Notes
- 1.
Identifying whether there is a complete set of rules for a specific set of templates is an open problem outside the scope of this work.
- 2.
The file declare_rules.txt in the data directory.
- 3.
In the actual code the predicate names are slightly different to avoid potential clashes with names used by ASPrin, and they can be parametrised.
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Chesani, F. et al. (2022). Optimising Business Process Discovery Using Answer Set Programming. In: Gottlob, G., Inclezan, D., Maratea, M. (eds) Logic Programming and Nonmonotonic Reasoning. LPNMR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13416. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15707-3_38
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