Process Mining Approaches to Detect Organizational Properties in Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPS) are service systems that connect physical and cyber elements through global networks. CPS put upon sensors and actuators as well as omnipresent status data of smart products in order to facilitate the design of innovative service offerings. CPS typically require the cooperation of several actors such as manufacturers of smart products and service providers. Organizational mining uses event log data produced by information systems to explore organizational structures and to analyze social networks representing communication structures. Hence, organizational mining is a promising approach for changing the organization of several actors in a CPS for the better and for improving the delivery of innovative CPS service offerings. However, approaches of this kind so far have not been discussed with regard to CPS. From a review of the literature on organizational mining this article therefore identifies 18 different approaches, and it discusses their requirements and possible challenges and obstacles of using them in a CPS. The main results from the analysis include that organizational mining may generally be well applicable to CPS while some serious challenges related to CPS characteristics such as distribution in space, different levels of granularity, and time issues require for further research.