CEBPI Colloquium: Prof. Wil M.P. van der Aalst presents on Process Discovery and Conformance

 

Process Discovery and Conformance: New challenges for process-aware information systems

Wil M.P. van der Aalst, TU Eindhoven, the Netherlands

Abstract

BPI, BAM, SOX and other buzzwords indicate that there is an increased interest in the monitoring and analysis of business processes.  At the same time process mining has become a vivid research area. Process discovery and conformance checking are two important challenges for the next generation of process-aware information systems.

The basic idea of process discovery is to uncover process models based event logs. There are different approaches (e.g., genetic algorithms but also more analytical approaches) using different target formats (e.g., Petri nets). Process discovery is not limited to the control-flow perspective, and may also imply the extraction of data, organizational, and social structures. Conformance checking aims at detecting and diagnosing differences between the intended behavior (e.g., a reference model) and the real behavior.

In this talk, Prof. Wil van der Aalst first provides a brief overview of the research done in the IS group in Eindhoven in the BPM area (e.g., workflow patterns and verification) and then zooms into the topic of process discovery and conformance. He will also show the ProM framework for supporting process mining efforts and discuss applications in the web services domain.

About the Presenter

Wil van der Aalst is a full professor and head of the Information Systems subdepartment of the department of Technology Management at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven. He is also an adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology, directs the Eindhoven Digital Laboratory for Business Processes (EDL-BP), and is a fellow and management team member of the research institute BETA. His research interests include business process management, information systems, simulation, Petri nets, process models, workflow management systems, process mining, verification techniques, enterprise resource planning systems, computer supported cooperative work, and cross-organizational business processes. He published more than 200 books, journal papers, book chapters, conference papers, and reports on these topics. Moreover, he has been the involved in the development of several software tools (Woflan, ExSpect, YAWL, ProM, XRL, etc.), and has been one of the driving forces behind the workflow patterns initiative.

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