Name: Ana Karla Alves de Medeiros, Eindhoven University of Technology: Process Mining.

Nowadays, most organizations use information systems to support the execution of their business processes. These information systems may contain an explicit model of the business processes (e.g. workflow management systems), may support the tasks involved in the processes without necessarily defining explicit process models (e.g. ERP systems), or may simply keep track (for auditing purposes) of the tasks that have been performed without providing any support for the actual execution of those tasks (e.g. custom made systems in hospitals). Either way, these information systems typically support logging capabilities that register what has been executed in the organization: general data about cases (i.e. process instances), times at which tasks were executed, persons or systems that performed the tasks, and so on. Such logs, called event logs, are the starting point for process mining.

Process mining targets the automatic discovery of information from an event log.

This discovered information can be used to deploy new systems that support the execution of business processes or as a feedback tool that helps in auditing, analyzing and improving already enacted business processes. The main benefit of process mining techniques is that information is objectively compiled. Depending on the type of data present in an event log, three different perspectives of process mining can be discovered. The control-flow perspective relates to the "How?" question (e.g. "How are the processes actually been executed?"), the organizational perspective to the "Who?" question (e.g. "Who is handing over work to whom?"), and the case perspective to the "What?" question (e.g. "What is the average throughput time for cases of a certain process?"). All these three perspectives are complementary and relevant for process mining.

This talk will give an overview of the main developments in the process mining research area. Furthermore, it will show how use the ProM tool to perform analysis in each perspective (control-flow, organizational and case). ProM is an open-source framework that aids the development of process mining techniques. This tool is freely available at www.processmining.org.