Defining and Discovering Cardinalities of the Temporal Workcases from XES-based Workflow Logs

Workflow management system is a system that manages the workflow model which defines the process of work in reality. We can define the workflow process by sequencing jobs which is performed by the performers. Using the workflow management system, we can also analyze the flow of the process and revise it more efficiently. Many researches are focused on how to make the workflow process model more efficiently and manage it more easily. Recently, many researches use the workflow log files which are the execution history of the workflow process model performed by the workflow management system. Ourresearch group has many interests in making useful knowledge from the workflow event logs. In this paper we use XES log files because there are many data using this format. This papersuggests what are the cardinalities of the temporal workcases and how to get them from the workflow event logs. Cardinalities of the temporal workcases are the occurrence pattern of critical elements in the workflow process. We discover instance cardinalities, activity cardinalities and organizational resource cardinalities from several XES-based workflow event logs and visualize them. The instance cardinality defines the occurrence of the workflow process instances, the activity cardinality defines the occurrence of the activities and the organizational cardinality defines the occurrence of the organizational resources. From them, we expect to get many useful knowledge such as a patterns of the control flow of the process, frequently executed events, frequently working performer and etc. In further, we even expect to predict the original process model by only using the workflow event logs.