Automatic Extraction of Process Control Flow from I/O Operations

Many end users will expect the output of process mining to be a model they can easily understand. On the other hand, knowing which objects were accessed in each operation can be a valuable input for process discovery. From these two trends it is possible to establish an analogy between process mining and the discovery of program structure. In this paper we present an approach for extracting process control-flow from a trace of read and write operations over a set of objects. The approach is divided in two independent phases. In the first phase, Fourier analysis is used to identify periodic behavior that can be represented with loop constructs. In the second phase, a match-and-merge technique is used to produce a control-flow graph capable of generating the input trace and thus representing the process that generated it. The combination of these techniques provides a structured and compact representation of the unknown process, with very good results in terms of conformance metrics.

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