Business Models Enhancement through Discovery of Roles

Control flow discovery algorithms are able to reconstruct the workflow of a business process from a log of performed activities. These algorithms, however, do not pay attention to the reconstruction of roles, i.e. they do not group activities according to the skills required to perform them. Information about roles in business processes is commonly considered important and explicitly integrated into the process representation, e.g. as swimlanes in BPMN diagrams. This work proposes an approach to enhance a business process model with information on roles. Specifically, the identification of roles is based on the detection of handover of roles. On the basis of candidates for roles handover, the set of activities is first partitioned and then subsets of activities which are performed by the same originators are merged, so to obtain roles. All significant partitions of activities are automatically generated. Experimental results on several logs show that the set of generated roles is not too large and it always contains the correct definition of roles. We also propose an entropy based measure to rank the candidate roles which returns promising experimental results.