SEFM Keynote on Object-Centric Process Mining
On Thursday, September 19th, 2019, Wil van der Aalst gave a keynote at the 17th edition of the International Conference on Software Engineering and Formal Methods (Oslo, Norway). He used the opportunity to introduce the new field of Object-Centric Process Mining. He addressed the problem that one event may be related to different cases (convergence) and, for a given case, there may be multiple instances of the same activity within a case (divergence).
To create a traditional process model, the event data need to be "flattened". There are typically multiple choices possible, leading to different views that are disconnected. Therefore, one quickly loses the overview and event data need to be exacted multiple times (for the different views). In his keynote, Wil proposed different approaches to tackle the problem. A specific logging format was proposed where events can be related to objects of different types. Moreover, basic notations and a baseline discovery approach were presented to facilitate discussion and understanding.A summary of the keynote is provided in the paper: W.M.P. van der Aalst. Object-Centric Process Mining: Dealing With Divergence and Convergence in Event Data. In P.C. Ölveczky and G. Salaün, editors, Software Engineering and Formal Methods (SEFM 2019), volume 11724 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 3-25. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2019.