Abductive workflow mining

Abstract

We define a new approach to discovering important workflows from event logs, referred to as abductive workflow mining, as the process of determining activity that would necessarily imply that certain predetermined critical activity should necessarily take place. Whenever critical activity is observed, one can inspect the abductive workflow to ascertain whether there was sufficient reason for the critical activity to occur. Initial theory surrounding the concept of abductive workflow is defined, and an initial method for discovering abductive workflows is presented. Preliminary experiments show that relatively small and concise abductive workflow models can be constructed, in comparison with constructing a complete model for the entire log. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.