| Abstract: | The agile workflow technology deals with flexible workflow adaptation and overriding, in case of foreseen as well as unforeseen changes and problems in the operating business environment. One key issue that an agile workflow system should address is Business Process (BP) monitoring, which we define as a set of activities for organizing process instance logs and for highlighting non-compliances and adaptations with respect to the default process schema. Such activities can be the starting point for a set of a-posteriori log analyses.
In this paper, we describe an automated support to BP monitoring, which exploits the retrieval step of the Case-based Reasoning (CBR) methodology.
In particular, our framework allows to retrieve traces of process execution similar to the current one. Moreover, it supports an automatic organization of the trace database content through the application of hierarchical clustering techniques. Results can provide support both to end users, in the process instance execution phase, and to process engineers, in (formal) process quality evaluation and long term process schema redefinition.
Retrieval and clustering rely on a distance definition able to take into account temporal information in traces. |
