Intention-Oriented Process Model Discovery from Incident Management Event Logs

TL;DR

This paper applies intention-oriented process mining to incident management logs, uncovering hidden user strategies and intentions using Hidden Markov Models, demonstrating its potential in understanding complex ITIL processes.

Contribution

It introduces the first application of intention-oriented process mining to incident management logs, utilizing HMMs to discover unobservable user behaviors and strategies.

Findings

Successfully uncovered user strategies from real-world incident logs

Generated coarse-grained process models reflecting user intentions

Discussed applicability, effectiveness, and challenges of the approach

Abstract

Intention-oriented process mining is based on the belief that the fundamental nature of processes is mostly intentional (unlike activity-oriented process) and aims at discovering strategy and intentional process models from event-logs recorded during the process enactment. In this paper, we present an application of intention-oriented process mining for the domain of incident management of an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) process. We apply the Map Miner Method (MMM) on a large real-world dataset for discovering hidden and unobservable user behavior, strategies and intentions. We first discover user strategies from the given activity sequence data by applying Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based unsupervised learning technique. We then process the emission and transition matrices of the discovered HMM to generate a coarse-grained Map Process Model. We present the first application or study of the new and emerging field of Intention-oriented process mining on an incident management event-log dataset and discuss its applicability, effectiveness and challenges.