ProM web edition?

derrekwu

Hello everyone! I come from a company running business on top of popular technologies like jBPM5 and Pentaho(for data analysis). I can perform basic analysis against an OLAP cube created for our BPM data set, and not surprisingly, it's far from good and non-comparable with ProM. 

So here comes my question: is there any plan for a web edition of ProM? It would be *really* nice if we can integrate process mining in a centralized portal(Pentaho in this case), so that we can have everything related to a process presented in our dashboard.

I'm downloading source codes from SVN, and I saw a possible solution at here. But still, I hope someone can jump in and feel free to add your comments.

JBuijs

Hi Derek,

The solution provided in the link is indeed a work around in order to generate pictures from ProM programmatically.

Just to quickly reply to your points:
1) Did you check out XESame, or XTract (an advanced version of XESame but still under development)? You should be able to quite easily write some Java code that performs a particular extraction on a regular basis.
2&3&4) That would be cool indeed
5) I know there has been some work on (discovering) hierarchical Petri nets by Boudewijn van Dongen and others. You might find something during a quick internet/publication search. Currently a colleague of me (Dennis Schunselaar) and myself are working with process trees, which are inherently hierarchical.
6) The techniques are there, you just need 'editor' functionality to modify the Petri net.
7) There is a publication underway that takes a process model and event log and then improves it with a limited number of edits. Please keep an eye out for 'process model improvement' papers for both the SIMPDA 2012 post proceedings and the BPM 2013 BPI workshop
8) This should be already available in one of the BPMN packages (most of which are still under development) or otherwise should not be too complicated in itself. Projecting for instance replay results on the BPMN model might be more challenging
9) This could be done using the solution of 8 and of course also the translation of BPMN to Petri nets. Animation on a Petri net however is not implemented yet, it does exist for fuzzy models (but for these no proper translations to/from BPMN can be made).

I like your ideas and vision, Please keep us updated of your progress and/or if you have interesting research challenges for us or one of our master students to put our teeth in

JBuijs

Hi Derrekwu,

First of all: the link in your post refers back to this forum topic, so if you mean something else, please let us know

I think your post contains two interesting 'challenges':
1) Apply process mining on an OLAP data structure
2) Provide a web-based dashboard interface to ProM where pre-defined analysis results are shown.

To answer your first challenge: a master student in our group is currently developing a proof-of-concept of exactly this idea. The master project, thesis and prototype should be finished end of august. We see great potential for the combination of the OLAP data structure and process mining analysis.

The second challenge is a bit more difficult. As a first step it would be great if some prepared analysis results (mined process models, (dotted)charts, conformance analysis, etc. etc.) could be exported to an (interactive!) web environment where the customer can inspect the results.
As a next step it would be great if this was backed by an automated extraction and analysis part that would update this information/dashboard every night.
We already had this idea but so far did not find the time and resources to implement this. In case you see options for collaboration, please let us know.

I hope this answered your questions

derrekwu

Thanks for your reply Joos and sorry for the non-sense link I was referring http://www.win.tue.nl/promforum/discussion/211/export-graph-image-when-using-command-line , which could be considered as a workaround to have ProM integrated with a web portal. 

Glad to know you've started to work on the first thing and am looking forward to see the PoC. 

Basically I'm trying to use ProM to benefit both BAM(Business Activity Monitoring) and BPR(Business Process Re-Engineering). My list at this moment includes the following:

[Short-term]

1) Implement plugin to populate event logs directly from database(BPM or application-aware)

2) Encapsulate ProM as a backend service for process mining

3) Integrate the process mining service with our dashboard for BAM(and maybe Excel later?), to represent mined process diagram and performance statistics

[Long-term]

4) Web-based process animation(replay event log from DB), which will be integrated with the dashboard as well

5) Merge/Split process models to represent layered views(zoom in/out)

6) What-if analysis by adding/removing branches/nodes in process model, and then replay with enhanced event log

7) Plugin to compare gap between "real" process and the designed one

8) Plugin to convert mined process model to BPMN 2.0

9) Plugin to replay log against designed process(BPMN 2.0) and animation of course

...

I'm not an expert and am at the very beginning, but if you need assistant, I'd love to help you.

derrekwu

Please see my comments inline.

> The solution provided in the link is indeed a work around in order to generate pictures from ProM programmatically.

[Derek] Yes, and it can be also used as an approach to integrate with a web portal, e.g., passing parameters to a command line and then show the generated image in a web page.

> 1) Did you check out XESame, or XTract (an advanced version of XESame but still under development)? You should be able to quite easily write some Java code that performs a particular extraction on a regular basis.

[Derek] I tried XESame earlier but it seems not working with the database we're using. I also tried CSV file, but I was having problems with both ProM and XESame. I'm not quite sure if this relates to the operation system(Linux) I'm using, so I wrote a python program to convert CSV file to MXML. Anyway, I'll definitely take a closer look at them.

> 5) I know there has been some work on (discovering) hierarchical Petri nets by Boudewijn van Dongen and others. You might find something during a quick internet/publication search. Currently a colleague of me (Dennis Schunselaar) and myself are working with process trees, which are inherently hierarchical. 

[Derek] Cool... Cannot wait I was hoping to get some ideas from GIS system, but now I feel relief

> 6) The techniques are there, you just need 'editor' functionality to modify the Petri net.

[Derek] Good to know. Just Googled and it seems I'll need to install Yasper for this purpose. Let's see if I can play with it in Linux using wine

> 7) There is a publication underway that takes a process model and event log and then improves it with a limited number of edits. Please keep an eye out for 'process model improvement' papers for both the SIMPDA 2012 post proceedings and the BPM 2013 BPI workshop 

[Derek] Will do.

8) This should be already available in one of the BPMN packages (most of which are still under development) or otherwise should not be too complicated in itself. Projecting for instance replay results on the BPMN model might be more challenging

[Derek] I'm using ProM 6.2, so I only see XPDL support. I'll look into source code to see if BPMN 2.0 is supported as well.

9) This could be done using the solution of 8 and of course also the translation of BPMN to Petri nets. Animation on a Petri net however is not implemented yet, it does exist for fuzzy models (but for these no proper translations to/from BPMN can be made).

[Derek] Agree. The reason why I want animation over BPMN is that it's an instinct approach to see how designed process works in a real environment - this will be very helpful for people already had their own process model.

Back to the topic, I'm very interested in your great work, and I'll surely give you guys updates on my progress moving forward.

Holger

Hey Derek, could you already realise your intend to have a web edition of ProM?

Especially the following steps, which you already mentioned above, I am very interested in.

1) Implement plugin to populate event logs directly from database(BPM or application-aware)

2) Encapsulate ProM as a backend service for process mining

3) Integrate the process mining service with our dashboard for BAM(and maybe Excel later?), to represent mined process diagram and performance statistics

[Long-term]

4) Web-based process animation(replay event log from DB), which will be integrated with the dashboard as well

It would be very nice if you could support me.


Best regards
Holger