Towards Action-State Process Model Discovery

Process model discovery covers the different methodologies used to mine a process model from traces of process executions, and it has an important role in artificial intelligence research. Current approaches in this area, with a few exceptions, focus on determining a model of the flow of actions only. However, in several contexts, (i) restricting the attention to actions is quite limiting, since the effects of such actions also have to be analyzed, and (ii) traces provide additional pieces of information in the form of states (i.e., values of parameters possibly affected by the actions); for instance, in several medical domains, the traces include both actions and measurements of patient parameters. In this paper, we propose AS-SIM (Action-State SIM), the first approach able to mine a process model that comprehends two distinct classes of nodes, to capture both actions and states.