Encoding process discovery problems in SMT

• Published in: Software and systems modeling Vol. 17; no. 4; pp. 1055 - 1078
• Main Authors: Solé, Marc, Carmona, Josep
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01.10.2018; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Coding; Compilers; Computer Science; Data mining; Domains; Information systems; Information Systems Applications (incl.Internet); Interpreters; IT in Business; Municipalities; Programming Languages; Programming Techniques; Regular Paper; Software Engineering; Software Engineering/Programming and Operating Systems; SMT application; Causal nets; Petri nets; Process discovery
• ISSN: 1619-1366; 1619-1374; 1619-1374
• DOI: 10.1007/s10270-016-0536-y

Information systems , which are responsible for driving many processes in our lives (health care, the web, municipalities, commerce and business, among others), store information in the form of logs which is often left unused. Process mining , a discipline in between data mining and software engineering , proposes tailored algorithms to exploit the information stored in a log, in order to reason about the processes underlying an information system. A key challenge in process mining is discovery : Given a log, derive a formal process model that can be used afterward for a formal analysis. In this paper, we provide a general approach based on satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) as a solution for this challenging problem. By encoding the problem into the logical/arithmetic domains and using modern SMT engines, it is shown how two separate families of process models can be discovered. The theory of this paper is accompanied with a tool, and experimental results witness the significance of this novel view of the process discovery problem.