Formal Concept Analysis for Process Enhancement Based on a Pair of Perspectives

In this paper, we propose to use formal concept analysis for process enhancement, which is applied to enterprise processes, e.g., operations for patients in a hospital, repair of imperfect products in a company. Process enhancement, which is one of main goals of process mining, is to analyze a process recorded in an event log, and to improve its eciency based on the analysis. Data formats of the logs, which con- tain events observed from actual processes, depend on perspectives on the observation. For example, events in logs based on a so-called process perspective are represented by their types and time-stamps, and obser- vation based on a so-called organization perspective records events with organizations relating the occurrence of them. The logs recently became large and complex, and events are represented by many features. How- ever, previous techniques of process mining take a single perspective into account. For process enhancement, by formal concept analysis based on a pair of features from dierent perspectives, we define subsequences of events whose stops are fatal to execution of a process as weak points to be removed. In our method, the extent of every concept is a set of event types, and the intent is a set of resources for events in the extent, and then, for each extent, its weakness is calculated by taking into account event frequency. We also propose some basic ideas to remove the weakest points.