Workflow Mining: Discovering Loops in Process Models

The growing complexity of processes in many organizations stimulates the adoption of business process management techniques. Process models typically lie at the basis of these techniques and generally, the assumption is made that the operational business processes as they are taking place in practice confirm to these models. Technologies such as workflow management, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) etc., typically focus on the realization of it [1], [2], [8]. The current research in process mining still has problems in mining some common constructs in workflow models. Among these constructs are loops. Because loops are the major concern for boundedness of any process model. This paper discusses about representing workflow model using Petri Nets and a method to identify loops. For identifying loops topological sorting is used. In the literature process logs are used to identify short loops of length two but the proposed algorithm identify loops of any length.