Process Mining

This is the second edition of Wil van der Aalst’s seminal book on process mining, which now discusses the field also in the broader context of data science and big data approaches. It includes several additions and updates, e.g. on inductive mining techniques, the notion of alignments, a considerably expanded section on software tools and a completely new chapter of process mining in the large. It is self-contained, while at the same time covering the entire process-mining spectrum from process discovery to predictive analytics.

After a general introduction to data science and process mining in Part I, Part II provides the basics of business process modeling and data mining necessary to understand the remainder of the book. Next, Part III focuses on process discovery as the most important process mining task, while Part IV moves beyond discovering the control flow of processes, highlighting conformance checking, and organizational and time perspectives. Part V offers a guide to successfully applying process mining in practice, including an introduction to the widely used open-source tool ProM and several commercial products. Lastly, Part VI takes a step back, reflecting on the material presented and the key open challenges. 

Overall, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in process mining. It is intended for business process analysts, business consultants, process managers, graduate students, and BPM researchers.

Table of Contents

Part I Introduction

1 Data Science in Action

2 Process Mining: The Missing Link

Part II Preliminaries

3 Process Modeling and Analysis

4 Data Mining

Part III From Event Logs to Process Models

5 Getting the Data

6 Process Discovery: An Introduction

7 Advanced Process Discovery Techniques

Part IV Beyond Process Discovery

8 Conformance Checking

9 Mining Additional Perspectives

10 Operational Support

Part V Putting Process Mining to Work

11 Process Mining Software

12 Process Mining in the Large

13 Analyzing “Lasagna Processes”

14 Analyzing “Spaghetti Processes”

Part VI Reflection

15 Cartography and Navigation

16 Epilogue

About the Author

Wil van der Aalst is a full professor at the Department of Mathematics & Computer Science of the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e), The Netherlands, where he chairs the Architecture of Information Systems (AIS) group and serves as the scientific director of the Data Science Center Eindhoven. He also has a part-time appointment in the BPM group of Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia. His research and teaching interests include information systems, business process management, process modeling, Petri nets, process mining, and simulation.

Wil has published more than 180 journal papers, 19 books, 425 refereed conference or workshop publications, and 60 book chapters. Many of his papers are highly cited (he has a H-index of more than 123 according to Google Scholar, the highest among all European computer scientists) and his ideas on process support have influenced researchers, software developers, and standardization committees worldwide.