Conformance Checking in Processes Choreographies

(Business) processes are often designed, implemented, and executed in distributed ways. Examples include process networks in companies or organizations or process choreographies that span multiple business partners, e.g., in a supply chain [FRKR15]. Recently, distributed processes have been also analyzed in the context of blockchain technologies [Mend18]. Process mining comprises a set of techniques for (i) process discovery, (ii) conformance checking, and (iii) process enhancement from   process execution logs (offline) or process event streams (online). While a body of research, prototypes, and commercial tools exists for mining intra-organizational, i.e., non distributed processes, there are only few approaches to mine distributed processes. The main challenge for distributed processes is that in fully decentralized settings, not all information on the partner processes is available, i.e., private tasks of on partner are not visible to the others due to confidentiality reasons. As a consequence, also the process execution log/stream of a distributed process might only contain the information on the public parts [FRI15]. This Master thesis aims at:

• Providing a systematic literature analysis on discovery and mining of distributed processes.
• Providing different options for logging / aggregation event streams in distributed settings.
• Create a testbed for distributed processes, based on the cpee.org process engine, and a supply chain process model and data set.
• Providing a conformance checking algorithm for distributed processes at a conceptual level and as prototypical implementation.

Strong skills in python, ruby or javascript are required.

Contact: master.i17 [at] in.tum.de

[Aals16] Wil van der Aalst: Process Mining - Data Science in Action, Springer (2016)
[FRI15] Walid Fdhila, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, Conrad Indiono: Change Propagation Analysis and Prediction in Process Choreographies. Int. J. Cooperative Inf. Syst. 24(3): 1541003:1-1541003:33 (2015)
[FRKR15] Walid Fdhila, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, David Knuplesch, Manfred Reichert: Change and Compliance in Collaborative Processes. SCC 2015: 162-169
[Mend18] Jan Mendling, Ingo Weber, Wil M. P. van der Aalst, Jan vom Brocke, Cristina Cabanillas, Florian Daniel, Søren Debois, Claudio Di Ciccio, Marlon Dumas, Schahram Dustdar, Avigdor Gal, Luciano García-Bañuelos, Guido Governatori, Richard Hull, Marcello La Rosa, Henrik Leopold, Frank Leymann, Jan Recker, Manfred Reichert, Hajo A. Reijers, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, Andreas Solti, Michael Rosemann, Stefan Schulte, Munindar P. Singh, Tijs Slaats, Mark Staples, Barbara Weber, Matthias Weidlich, Mathias Weske, Xiwei Xu, Liming Zhu:
Blockchains for Business Process Management - Challenges and Opportunities. ACM Trans. Manag. Inf. Syst. 9(1): 4:1-4:16 (2018)