A.: Issues in process variants mining

Abstract. In today’s dynamic business world economic success of an en-terprise increasingly depends on its ability to react to internal and exter-nal changes in a quick and flexible way. In response to this need, process-aware information systems (PAIS) emerged, which support the modeling, orchestration and monitoring of business processes and services respec-tively. Recently, a new generation of flexible PAIS was introduced, which additionally allows for dynamic process and service changes. This, in turn, will lead to a large number of process variants, which are created from the same original process model, but might slightly differ from each other. This paper deals with issues related to the mining of such process variant collections. Our overall goal is to learn from process changes and to merge the resulting model variants into a generic process model in the best possible way. By adopting this generic process model in the PAIS, future cost of process change and need for process adaptations will de-crease. Finally, we compare our approach with existing process mining techniques, and show that process variants mining is additionally needed to learn from process changes. Index Terms—Process Configuration, Process Variants, High-level Change, process variants minin