Discovering High-Quality Process Models Despite Data Scarcity

Abstract: Process discovery algorithms learn process models from executed activity sequences, describing concurrency, causality, and conflict. Concurrent activities require observing multiple permutations, increasing data requirements, especially for processes with concurrent subprocesses such as hierarchical, composite, or distributed processes. While process discovery algorithms traditionally use sequences of activities as input, recently introduced object-centric process discovery algorithms can use graphs of activities as input, encoding partial orders between activities. As such, they contain the concurrency information of many sequences in a single graph. In this paper, we address the research question of reducing process discovery data requirements when using object-centric event logs for process discovery. We classify different real-life processes according to the control-flow complexity within and between subprocesses and introduce an evaluation framework to assess process discovery algorithm quality of traditional and object-centric process discovery based on the sample size. We complement this with a large-scale production process case study. Our results show reduced data requirements, enabling the discovery of large, concurrent processes such as manufacturing with little data, previously infeasible with traditional process discovery. Our findings suggest that object-centric process mining could revolutionize process discovery in various sectors, including manufacturing and supply chains.