Process mining applied to the test process of wafer steppers in ASML

Process mining techniques attempt to extract nontrivial and useful information from event logs. For example, there are many process mining techniques to automatically discover a process model describing the causal dependencies between activities. Several successful case studies have been reported in literature, all demonstrating the applicability of process mining. However, these case studies refer to rather structured administrative processes. In this paper, we investigate the applicability of process mining to less structured processes. We report on a case study where the process mining (ProM) framework has been applied to the test processes of ASML (the leading manufacturer of wafer scanners in the world).This case study provides many interesting insights. On the one hand, process mining is also applicable to the less structured processes of ASML. On the other hand, the case study also shows the need for alternative mining approaches