Data-driven performance analysis of scheduled processes

Abstract

The performance of scheduled business processes is of central importance for services and manufacturing systems. However, current techniques for performance analysis do not take both queueing semantics and the process perspective into account. In this work, we address this gap by developing a novel method for utilizing rich process logs to analyze performance of scheduled processes. The proposed method combines simulation, queueing analytics, and statistical methods. At the heart of our approach is the discovery of an individual-case model from data, based on an extension of the Colored Petri Nets formalism. The resulting model can be simulated to answer performance queries, yet it is computational inefficient. To reduce the computational cost, the discovered model is projected into Queueing Networks, a formalism that enables efficient performance analytics. The projection is facilitated by a sequence of folding operations that alter the structure and dynamics of the Petri Net model. We evaluate the approach with a real-world dataset from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a large outpatient cancer hospital in the United States.