Workflow mining: Current status and future directions

Current workflow management systems require the explicit design of the workflows that express the business process of an organization. This process design is very time consuming and error prone. Considerable work has been done to develop heuristics to mine event-data logs to produce a process model that can support the workflow design process. However, all the existing heuristic-based mining algorithms have their limitations. To achieve more insight into these limitations the starting point in this paper is the alpha-algorithm [3] for which it is proved under which conditions and process constructs the algorithm works. After presentation of the a-algorithm, a classification is given of the process constructs that are difficult to handle for this type of algorithms. Then, for some constructs (i.e. short loops) it is illustrated in which way the alpha-algorithm can be extended so that it can correctly discover these constructs.