Project R-4630

Integrating Business Process Mining with Business Process Simulation: Using the present to understand the future. (Research)

Business management is about achieving predefined business goals using available means. In today's process-centric business environment, business process simulation models with good predictive capabilities are high potential business intelligence tools. However, various authors have claimed that business process simulation has yet to deliver on its potential and various limitations of the current techniques have been identified as the cause of this missed opportunity. Often, these limitations relate to naïve assumptions being made which result in less realistic simulation models. With the rise of process aware information systems, companies posses over a large amount of data on their process executions. The goal of this research proposal is to use process mining techniques to extract useful information from this vast amount of process data and to transform it into more realistic business process simulation models. More specifically, process mining will be used to empirically learn the process control flow, to discover and implement multiple control-flow variants, to extract resource schedules, to realistically model human resource behavior, to learn the proper control-flow logic and to discover the actual priority handling rules. This research proposal aims to successfully integrate event log information and process mining with business process simulation.

01 October 2013 - 30 September 2017