$\textit{Dirigo}$: A Method to Extract Event Logs for Object-Centric Processes

TL;DR

The paper introduces Dirigo, a novel method for extracting object-centric event logs that conform to OCEL 2.0 and include temporal object relations, improving the quality and expressiveness of process data representation.

Contribution

Dirigo is the first method to generate OCEL 2.0 logs with dynamic object-to-object relations, validated against quality criteria on real-world data.

Findings

Dirigo produces high-quality OCEL 2.0 logs with temporal relations.

The method outperforms existing log extraction approaches.

Validated on a real-life use case with positive results.

Abstract

Real-world processes involve multiple object types with intricate interrelationships. Traditional event logs (in XES format), which record process execution centred around the case notion, are restricted to a single-object perspective, making it difficult to capture the behaviour of multiple objects and their interactions. To address this limitation, object-centric event logs (OCEL) have been introduced to capture both the objects involved in a process and their interactions with events. The object-centric event data (OCED) metamodel extends the OCEL format by further capturing dynamic object attributes and object-to-object relations. Recently OCEL 2.0 has been proposed based on OCED metamodel. Current research on generating OCEL logs requires specific input data sources, and resulting log data often fails to fully conform to OCEL 2.0. Moreover, the generated OCEL logs vary across different representational formats and their quality remains unevaluated. To address these challenges, a set of quality criteria for evaluating OCEL log representations is established. Guided by these criteria, $\textit{Dirigo}$ is proposed -- a method for extracting event logs that not only conforms to OCEL 2.0 but also extends it by capturing the temporal aspect of dynamic object-to-object relations. Object-role Modelling (ORM), a conceptual data modelling technique, is employed to describe the artifact produced at each step of $\textit{Dirigo}$. To validate the applicability of $\textit{Dirigo}$, it is applied to a real-life use case, extracting an event log via simulation. The quality of the log representation of the extracted event log is compared to those of existing OCEL logs using the established quality criteria.