Skip Miner: Towards the Simplification of Spaghetti-like Business Process Models

Abstract

The importance of correctly monitoring business processes within organisations is increasing the interest on process mining techniques, especially process discovery techniques that aim to model the real behaviour of processes from their multiple executions. Notwithstanding, the resulting process models are sometimes extremely complex and lack structure, hence hampering their comprehension. This kind of processes are popularly known as spaghetti processes. With the aim to simplify and bring meaningful structure to spaghetti processes, this article presents Skip Miner, a novel process discovery algorithm implementing a built-in simplification strategy, that attempts to reduce the complexity of process models. For the sake of completeness, the method is evaluated using a real event log encompassing spaghetti-like processes and, it is compared with other simplification techniques available in the literature.