Concurrency In Inductive Visual Miner

cfoley

Hi,

I am finding some unusual behavior in the inductive visual miner regarding concurrency. Specifically I have a log with 4 traces, if I include all traces in the input to inductive visual miner I see a concurrency '+' node appearing in the graph. If however I use the pre-mining filter and performing mining one-by-one on the 4 traces on their own individually I do not see this concurrency appearing, to me this seems like an error unless I am interpreting the '+' symbol incorrectly?

Anyone have experience with this that could help me understand what is going on?
Colum

kfgz087

Hi cfoley,

You are right that the '+' symbol means concurency. If you perform mining one-by-one on the 4 traces on their own individually, the concurrency  will disapper, which are correctly.

For instance, only if both trace "abcd" and "acbd" are observed in the input log, concurrency between b and c will be discovered. If you filter the log to remove one trace, the concurrency  will disapper.

cfoley

Ok so its concurrency across all traces rather than within a single trace. It was single trace concurrency that I was expecting the + symbol to represent, as in at a certain time in a single trace event b and c can happen at the same time.

kfgz087

As far as I know, inductive visual miner discovers concurrency based on the observed event sequences as I mentioned in last answer, rather than timestamp. In other words, although there is single trace concurrency, i.e., event b and c can happen at the same time, the concurrency cannot be discovered.

cfoley

OK many thanks for your reply, this was not the behavior I had expected.

sjjleemans

Inductive visual Miner can discover concurrency from single traces, if the trace contains start and completion events. For instance: from the trace <a_start, b_start, b_complete, a_complete>, IvM can discover that a and b are concurrent.

To enable this, choose in the 'miner' combobox the option 'life cycle miner (IMflc)'.

sjjleemans

cfoley said:

Ok so its concurrency across all traces rather than within a single trace. It was single trace concurrency that I was expecting the + symbol to represent, as in at a certain time in a single trace event b and c can happen at the same time.

This is correct: the + means that the parts (b and c) can be executed at the same time. However, to discover this, IvM needs some more information (e.g. from several traces, a repetition or start/completion events).

cfoley

Hi, many thanks for your reply. Is there an option I can specify that IVM should only represent concurrency within a trace rather and not across traces ? Will  'life cycle miner (IMflc)' do this?

sjjleemans

If I understand it correctly, there are start and completion events in your traces and B and C are interleaved (i.e. both need to be executed, but such that they do not overlap in time). IMflc should be able to detect this (and show <-> instead of +).

Alternatively, if you have a particular construct in mind that IvM will not discover, you could manually alter the model: click 'edit model' and change the relevant 'concurrent' into 'interleaved'. That model will execute both B and C, such that they cannot overlap.
Next, studying the deviations will reveal whether this is an appropriate construct.