Title: Desire Lines and Cow Paths in Big Data - Aligning Event Logs and Business Process Models

Abstract: Desire lines refer to tracks worn across grassy spaces - where people naturally walk - regardless of formal pathways. Parallels can be draw between such desire lines and day-to-day work performed in contemporary organizations. One thing is how managers think that people work, and another thing is how people actually work. In this talk, we will see how process mining techniques allow us to automatically discover process models from event logs. These models put into evidence desire lines as well as related phenomena such as cow paths, bottlenecks, and detours. Also, we will see how conformance checking techniques allow us to analyze differences between observed behavior and modeled behavior. The talk will focus on the alignment between process models and event logs and will define four conformance notions. Moreover, it will discuss ways of dealing with big data. In particular, it will introduce a notion of "passages" that can be used to decompose and distribute process mining problems.

About the speaker.
Wil van der Aalst is a full professor of Information Systems at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). His research interests include business process management, process mining and Petri nets. Prof. van der Aalst has published over 400 journal and conference papers, 50 book chapters and 17 books (as author or editor). With over 33,000 citations and an H-index of 88 according to Google Scholar, prof. van der Aalst is the most-cited Dutch computer scientist. His ideas, particular on "workflow patterns" and "process mining" have influenced tool vendors and standardization efforts, most prominently the BPMN standard for process modeling. He is member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen) and the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea).