Automated discovery of workflow models from hospital data

European journal of operational research, 2001

Despite their wide range of applications, work¯ow systems still suer from lack of an agreed and standard modelling technique. It is a motivating research area and some researchers have proposed dierent modelling techniques. Petri nets, among the other techniques, are one of the mainly used modelling techniques for both qualitative and quantitative analysis of work¯ow and work¯ow systems. We have brie¯y presented a way of mapping work¯ow into Petri nets, which can be used as a basis for such systems. A lot of available papers on Petri net-based modelling of work¯ow have been reviewed and classi®ed. Ó

Journal of Circuits Systems and Computers, 1998

2010

Abstract This paper addresses the management and performance analysis of the pulmonology department of the general hospital of Bari, Italy, focusing on the department workflow and drug distribution system. To this aim, we present a discrete event system model which can be employed as a support for taking decisions regarding the information and automation integration in order to improve the drug procurement logistics and management.

International Journal of Computer Applications, 2011

The growing complexity of processes in many organizations stimulates the adoption of business process management techniques. Process models typically lie at the basis of these techniques and generally, the assumption is made that the operational business processes as they are taking place in practice confirm to these models. Technologies such as workflow management, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) etc., typically focus on the realization of it [1], [2], . The current research in process mining still has problems in mining some common constructs in workflow models. Among these constructs are loops. Because loops are the major concern for boundedness of any process model. This paper discusses about representing workflow model using Petri Nets and a method to identify loops. For identifying loops topological sorting is used. In the literature process logs are used to identify short loops of length two but the proposed algorithm identify loops of any length.

Process mining is concerned with the analysis, understanding and improvement of business processes. Process discovery, i.e. discovering a process model based on an event log, is considered the most challenging process mining task. State-ofthe-art process discovery algorithms only discover local control flow patterns and are unable to discover complex, non-local patterns. Region theory based techniques, i.e. an established class of process discovery techniques, do allow for discovering such patterns. However, applying region theory directly results in complex, overfitting models, which is less desirable. Moreover, region theory does not cope with guarantees provided by state-of-the-art process discovery algorithms, both w.r.t. structural and behavioural properties of the discovered process models. In this paper we present an ILP-based process discovery approach, based on region theory, that guarantees to discover relaxed sound workflow nets. Moreover, we devise a filtering algorithm, based on the internal working of the ILP-formulation, that is able to cope with the presence of infrequent, exceptional behaviour. We have extensively evaluated the technique using different event logs with different levels of exceptional behaviour. Our experiments show that the presented approach allows us to leverage the inherent shortcomings of existing region-based approaches. The techniques presented are implemented and B S. J. van Zelst

Proceedings of the 13th Belgium-Netherlands Conference on Artificial Intelligence (BNAIC 2001), 2001

Contemporary workflow management systems are driven by explicit process models, ie, a completely specified workflow design is required in order to enact a given workflow process. Creating a workflow design is a complicated time-consuming process and typically there are discrepancies between the actual workflow processes and the processes as perceived by the management. Therefore, we propose a technique for process mining. This technique uses workflow logs to discover the workflow process as it is actually being ...

More and more firms are marching to the drumbeat of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and Workflow Management (WFM). This trend exposes the need for techniques for the construction and analysis of business procedures. In this paper we focus on a class of Petri nets suitable for the representation, validation and verification of these procedures. We will show that the correctness of a procedure represented by such a Petri net can be verified in polynomial time. Based on this result we provide a comprehensive set of transformation rules which can be used to construct and modify correct procedures.

As information systems are becoming more and more intertwined with the operational processes they support, multitudes of events are recorded by todays information systems. The goal of process mining is to use such event data to extract process related information, e.g., to automatically discover a process model by observing events recorded by some system or to check the conformance of a given model by comparing it with reality. In this article, we focus on process discovery, i.e., extracting a process model from an event log. We focus on Petri nets as a representation language, because of the concurrent and unstructured nature of real-life processes. The goal is to introduce several approaches to discover Petri nets from event data (notably the α-algorithm, state-based regions, and language-based regions). Moreover, important requirements for process discovery are discussed. For example, process mining is only meaningful if one can deal with incompleteness (only a fraction of all possible behavior is observed) and noise (one would like to abstract from infrequent random behavior). These requirements reveal significant challenges for future research in this domain.

2009 IEEE/INFORMS International Conference on Service Operations, Logistics and Informatics, 2009

While the use of information technologies is becoming increasingly widespread in healthcare organizations, such as large hospitals, to date these organizations lack unified information systems providing a comprehensive view of the organization's state. We define a technique for building formal models capturing the state of hospital departments and the interactions among departments during hospital operations. These models, based on Petri nets, will support a variety of management and decision-support tools, such as statistical analysis, simulation, and dynamic reconfiguration. These models are at the core of a new software prototype that we are developing for the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago.

2003

A top-down approach for workflow design is proposed in the framework of Petri net theory. Simple but powerful refinement rules are proposed that guarantee soundness of the resulting workflow nets. The refinement process supports the definition of regions, which are parts of the workflow that correspond to logistically related items. Exception handlers can be associated to regions. Defining regions helps determining the impact areas of the unexpected events during workflow execution.