scholarly journals Learning From the Past: Uncovering Design Process Models Using an Enriched Process Mining

2018 ◽  
Vol 140 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lijun Lan ◽  
Ying Liu ◽  
Wen Feng Lu

Design documents and design project footprints accumulated by corporate information technology systems have increasingly become valuable sources of evidence for design information and knowledge management. Identification and extraction of such embedded information and knowledge into a clear and usable format will greatly accelerate continuous learning from past design efforts for competitive product innovation and efficient design process management in future design projects. Most of the existing design information extraction systems focus on either organizing design documents for efficient retrieval or extracting relevant product information for product optimization. Different from traditional systems, this paper proposes a methodology of learning and extracting useful knowledge using past design project documents from design process perspective based on process mining techniques. Particularly different from conventional techniques that deal with timestamps or event logs only, a new process mining approach that is able to directly process textual data is proposed at the first stage of the proposed methodology. The outcome is a hierarchical process model that reveals the actual design process hidden behind a large amount of design documents and enables the connection of various design information from different perspectives. At the second stage, the discovered process model is analyzed to extract multifaceted knowledge patterns by applying a number of statistical analysis methods. The outcomes range from task dependency study from workflow analysis, identification of irregular task execution from performance analysis, cooperation pattern discovery from social net analysis to evaluation of personal contribution based on role analysis. Relying on the knowledge patterns extracted, lessons and best practices can be uncovered which offer great support to decision makers in managing any future design initiatives. The proposed methodology was tested using an email dataset from a university-hosted multiyear multidisciplinary design project.

Author(s):  
Lijun Lan ◽  
Ying Liu ◽  
Wen Feng Lu

The increasing design documents created in the design process provide a useful source of process-oriented design information. Hence, the need for automated design information extraction using advanced text mining techniques is increasing. However, most of the existing text mining approaches have problems in mining design information in depth, which results in low efficiency in applying the discovered information to improve the design project. With the aim of extracting process-oriented design information from design documents in depth, this paper proposes a layered text mining approach that produces a hierarchical process model which captures the process behavior at the different level of details. Our approach consists of several interrelated algorithms, namely, a content-based document clustering algorithm, a hybrid named entity recognition (NER) algorithm and a frequency-based entity relationship detection method, which have been integrated into a system architecture for extracting design information from coarse-grained views to fine-grained specifications. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms, experiments were conducted on an email archive that was collected from a real-life design project. The results showed an increase in the detection accuracy for the process-oriented information detection.


Author(s):  
Bruna Brandão ◽  
Flávia Santoro ◽  
Leonardo Azevedo

In business process models, elements can be scattered (repeated) within different processes, making it difficult to handle changes, analyze process for improvements, or check crosscutting impacts. These scattered elements are named as Aspects. Similar to the aspect-oriented paradigm in programming languages, in BPM, aspect handling has the goal to modularize the crosscutting concerns spread across the models. This process modularization facilitates the management of the process (reuse, maintenance and understanding). The current approaches for aspect identification are made manually; thus, resulting in the problem of subjectivity and lack of systematization. This paper proposes a method to automatically identify aspects in business process from its event logs. The method is based on mining techniques and it aims to solve the problem of the subjectivity identification made by specialists. The initial results from a preliminary evaluation showed evidences that the method identified correctly the aspects present in the process model.


Author(s):  
Tetsuo Tomiyama

Abstract This paper proposes a new design process model that unifies theoretical results of General Design Theory (GDT) and empirical findings obtained from design experiments. It first reviews the design process models that were developed within theoretical work on GDT. Then, we describe experimental work on design based on protocol analysis, which resulted in a cognitive design process model from which further a computable design process model was derived. While these experimental results are supposed to support the theoretical conclusions obtained from GDT, we could also find out incompatibilities. We then propose a new design process model, called the refinement design process model, that can unify both theoretical results of GDT and experimental finding obtained from design experiments. The refinement model has better agreements with experimental findings and suggests various issues as a guiding principle to develop a future, advanced CAD system that helps a designer to focus on functional information. We propose and illustrate the concepts of such an advanced CAD system equipped with intensive design knowledge, called a computational framework for knowledge intensive engineering.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 1493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kwanghoon Pio Kim

In this paper, we propose an integrated approach for seamlessly and effectively providing the mining and the analyzing functionalities to redesigning work for very large-scale and massively parallel process models that are discovered from their enactment event logs. The integrated approach especially aims at analyzing not only their structural complexity and correctness but also their animation-based behavioral properness, and becomes concretized to a sophisticated analyzer. The core function of the analyzer is to discover a very large-scale and massively parallel process model from a process log dataset and to validate the structural complexity and the syntactical and behavioral properness of the discovered process model. Finally, this paper writes up the detailed description of the system architecture with its functional integration of process mining and process analyzing. More precisely, we excogitate a series of functional algorithms for extracting the structural constructs and for visualizing the behavioral properness of those discovered very large-scale and massively parallel process models. As experimental validation, we apply the proposed approach and analyzer to a couple of process enactment event log datasets available on the website of the 4TU.Centre for Research Data.


Author(s):  
M Cross ◽  
S Sivaloganathan

A number of design models have been proposed by design researchers, but they have not been adopted by industry because they are too generic. To be successful, companies have to manage effectively both project risk and concurrent development. The stage gate model is a suitable mechanism to achieve the required control within a commercial environment and there is evidence of its adoption by industry. The number of stages used depends on the degree of risk and the control needed in the project. Design methods are techniques that can assist designers to develop new products and knowledge can be classified as basic or specialist. This paper summarizes 100 key design methods from basic knowledge and suggests when they should be used. There are also company-specific design methods, which fall in the specialist knowledge category. An effective commercial design model should incorporate, firstly, a stage gate process that has stages defined to suit the project risk and to provide the control needed, secondly, the required level of concurrency, thirdly, appropriate basic design methods in the different stages, and, fourthly, appropriate specialist design methods in the different stages. This paper proposes a six-stepped methodology for developing such a company-specific design process model.


Author(s):  
Kwanghoon Kim

Process (or business process) management systems fulfill defining, executing, monitoring and managing process models deployed on process-aware enterprises. Accordingly, the functional formation of the systems is made up of three subsystems such as modeling subsystem, enacting subsystem and mining subsystem. In recent times, the mining subsystem has been becoming an essential subsystem. Many enterprises have successfully completed the introduction and application of the process automation technology through the modeling subsystem and the enacting subsystem. According as the time has come to the phase of redesigning and reengineering the deployed process models, from now on it is important for the mining subsystem to cooperate with the analyzing subsystem; the essential cooperation capability is to provide seamless integrations between the designing works with the modeling subsystem and the redesigning work with the mining subsystem. In other words, we need to seamlessly integrate the discovery functionality of the mining subsystem and the analyzing functionality of the modeling subsystem. This integrated approach might be suitable very well when those deployed process models discovered by the mining subsystem are complex and very large-scaled, in particular. In this paper, we propose an integrated approach for seamlessly as well as effectively providing the mining and the analyzing functionalities to the redesigning work on very large-scale and massively parallel process models that are discovered from their enactment event logs. The integrated approach especially aims at analyzing not only their structural complexity and correctness but also their animation-based behavioral properness, and becomes concretized to a sophisticated analyzer. The core function of the analyzer is to discover a very large-scale and massively parallel process model from a process log dataset and to validate the structural complexity and the syntactical and behavioral properness of the discovered process model. Finally, this paper writes up the detailed description of the system architecture with its functional integration of process mining and process analyzing. And more precisely, we excogitate a series of functional algorithms for extracting the structural constructs as well as for visualizing the behavioral properness on those discovered very large-scale and massively parallel process models. As experimental validation, we apply the proposed approach and analyzer to a couple of process enactment event log datasets available on the website of the 4TU.Centre for Research Data.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashok Kumar Saini ◽  
Ruchi Kamra ◽  
Utpal Shrivastava

Conformance Checking (CC) techniques enable us to gives the deviation between modelled behavior and actual execution behavior. The majority of organizations have Process-Aware Information Systems for recording the insights of the system. They have the process model to show how the process will be executed. The key intention of Process Mining is to extracting facts from the event log and used them for analysis, ratification, improvement, and redesigning of a process. Researchers have proposed various CC techniques for specific applications and process models. This paper has a detailed study of key concepts and contributions of Process Mining. It also helps in achieving business goals. The current challenges and opportunities in Process Mining are also discussed. The survey is based on CC techniques proposed by researchers with key objectives like quality parameters, perspective, algorithm types, tools, and achievements.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Li-li Wang ◽  
Xian-wen Fang ◽  
Esther Asare ◽  
Fang Huan

Infrequent behaviors of business process refer to behaviors that occur in very exceptional cases, and their occurrence frequency is low as their required conditions are rarely fulfilled. Hence, a strong coupling relationship between infrequent behavior and data flow exists. Furthermore, some infrequent behaviors may reveal very important information about the process. Thus, not all infrequent behaviors should be disregarded as noise, and identifying infrequent but correct behaviors in the event log is vital to process mining from the perspective of data flow. Existing process mining approaches construct a process model from frequent behaviors in the event log, mostly concentrating on control flow only, without considering infrequent behavior and data flow information. In this paper, we focus on data flow to extract infrequent but correct behaviors from logs. For an infrequent trace, frequent patterns and interactive behavior profiles are combined to find out which part of the behavior in the trace occurs in low frequency. And, conditional dependency probability is used to analyze the influence strength of the data flow information on infrequent behavior. An approach for identifying effective infrequent behaviors based on the frequent pattern under data awareness is proposed correspondingly. Subsequently, an optimization approach for mining of process models with infrequent behaviors integrating data flow and control flow is also presented. The experiments on synthetic and real-life event logs show that the proposed approach can distinguish effective infrequent behaviors from noise compared with others. The proposed approaches greatly improve the fitness of the mined process model without significantly decreasing its precision.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 2446
Author(s):  
Muktikanta Sahu ◽  
Rupjit Chakraborty ◽  
Gopal Krishna Nayak

Building process models from the available data in the event logs is the primary objective of Process discovery. Alpha algorithm is one of the popular algorithms accessible for ascertaining a process model from the event logs in process mining. The steps involved in the Alpha algorithm are computationally rigorous and this problem further manifolds with the exponentially increasing event log data. In this work, we have exploited task parallelism in the Alpha algorithm for process discovery by using MPI programming model. The proposed work is based on distributed memory parallelism available in MPI programming for performance improvement. Independent and computationally intensive steps in the Alpha algorithm are identified and task parallelism is exploited. The execution time of serial as well as parallel implementation of Alpha algorithm are measured and used for calculating the extent of speedup achieved. The maximum and minimum speedups obtained are 3.97x and 3.88x respectively with an average speedup of 3.94x.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document