SimBank: from Simulation to Solution in Prescriptive Process Monitoring

TL;DR

SimBank is a new simulator designed to benchmark prescriptive process monitoring methods by providing realistic, controlled, and diverse process scenarios, enabling comprehensive evaluation and comparison of different intervention strategies.

Contribution

This paper introduces SimBank, a novel simulator for PresPM that allows extensive benchmarking and evaluation of online and offline methods with complex interventions and causal challenges.

Findings

SimBank enables detailed comparison of PresPM techniques.

It supports experiments with complex interventions and causal analysis.

Demonstrated benchmarking capabilities through experiments with various methods.

Abstract

Prescriptive Process Monitoring (PresPM) is an emerging area within Process Mining, focused on optimizing processes through real-time interventions for effective decision-making. PresPM holds significant promise for organizations seeking enhanced operational performance. However, the current literature faces two key limitations: a lack of extensive comparisons between techniques and insufficient evaluation approaches. To address these gaps, we introduce SimBank: a simulator designed for accurate benchmarking of PresPM methods. Modeled after a bank's loan application process, SimBank enables extensive comparisons of both online and offline PresPM methods. It incorporates a variety of intervention optimization problems with differing levels of complexity and supports experiments on key causal machine learning challenges, such as assessing a method's robustness to confounding in data. SimBank additionally offers a comprehensive evaluation capability: for each test case, it can generate the true outcome under each intervention action, which is not possible using recorded datasets. The simulator incorporates parallel activities and loops, drawing from common logs to generate cases that closely resemble real-life process instances. Our proof of concept demonstrates SimBank's benchmarking capabilities through experiments with various PresPM methods across different interventions, highlighting its value as a publicly available simulator for advancing research and practice in PresPM.