Josep Carmona

Polytechnic University of Catalonia | UPC · Department of Computer Science

Detecting and reacting to non-technical losses (NTL) is a fundamental activity that energy providers need to face in their daily routines. This is known to be challenging since the phenomenon of NTL is multi-factored, dynamic and extremely contextual, which makes artificial intelligence (AI) and, in particular, machine learning, natural areas to br...

By relating observed and modelled behaviour, conformance checking unleashes the full power of process mining. Techniques from this discipline enable the analysis of the quality of a process model discovered from event data, the identification of potential deviations, and the projection of real traces onto process models. This way, the insights gain...

Non-technical losses (NTL) is a problem that many utility companies try to solve, often using black-box supervised classification algorithms. In general, this approach achieves good results. However, in practice, NTL detection faces technical, economic, and transparency challenges that cannot be easily solved and which compromise the quality and fa...

Process mining techniques can be used to analyse business processes using the data logged during their execution. These techniques are leveraged in a wide range of domains, including healthcare, where it focuses mainly on the analysis of diagnostic, treatment, and organisational processes. Despite the huge amount of data generated in hospitals by s...

State-of-the-art process discovery methods construct free-choice process models from event logs. Consequently, the constructed models do not take into account indirect dependencies between events. Whenever the input behaviour is not free-choice, these methods fail to provide a precise model. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for enhancing...

Textual descriptions of processes are ubiquitous in organizations, so that documentation of the important processes can be accessible to anyone involved. Unfortunately, the value of this rich data source is hampered by the challenge of analyzing unstructured information. In this paper we propose a framework to overcome the current limitations on de...

Decision models are strategic for formalizing how data influences the main decisions in a organization. Due to its importance, standard notations like DMN have appeared in recent years, to serve as a central resource for synchronizing the people and systems with respect to decisions. However, the modeling of DMN specifications can be tedious and er...

Alignments are a central notion in conformance checking. They establish the best possible connection between an observed trace and a process model, exhibiting the closest model run to the trace. Computing these alignments for huge amounts of traces, coming from big logs, is a computational bottleneck. We show that, for a slightly modified version o...

State-of-the-art process discovery methods construct free-choice process models from event logs. Consequently, the constructed models do not take into account indirect dependencies between events. Whenever the input behaviour is not free-choice, these methods fail to provide a precise model. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for enhancing...

The automatic extraction of formal process information from textual descriptions of processes is a challenging problem, but worth exploring, since it enables organizations to align complementary information that talks about processes. In this paper we continue our previous work on this area, based on defining hierarchical/tree patterns on the depen...

Conformance checking unleashes the full power of process mining: techniques from this discipline enable the analysis of the quality of a process model through the discovery of event data, the identification of potential deviations, and the projection of real traces onto process models. In this way, the insights gained from the available event data...

Conformance checking is a growing discipline that aims at assisting organizations in monitoring their processes. On its core, conformance checking relies on the computation of particular artefacts which enable reasoning on the relation between observed and modeled behavior. It is widely acknowledge that the computation of these artifacts is the lio...

A fundamental problem in conformance checking is aligning event data with process models. Unfortunately, existing techniques for this task are either complex, or can only be applicable to restricted classes of models. This in practice means that for large inputs, current techniques often fail to produce a result. In this paper we propose a method t...

Processes are a crucial artefact in organizations, since they coordinate the execution of activities so that products and services are provided. The use of models to analyse the underlying processes is a well-known practice. However, due to the complexity and continuous evolution of their processes, organizations need an effective way of analysing...

The comparison of trace variants of business processes opens the door for a fine-grained analysis of the distinctive features inherent in the executions of a process in an organization. The current approaches for trace variant analysis do not consider the situation where a process model is present, and therefore, it can guide the derivation of the...

Computing a mapping between two process models is a crucial technique, since it enables reasoning and operating across processes, like providing a similarity score between two processes, or merging different process variants to generate a consolidated process model. In this paper we present a new flexible technique for process model mapping, based...

Conformance checking is receiving increasing attention in the last years. This is due to several reasons, that can be summarized into two: the explosion of digital information that talks about processes, and the need to use this data in order to monitor and improve processes in organizations. Naturally, conformance checking addresses this by provid...

Utility companies have a great interest in identifying energy losses. Here, we focus on Non-Technical Losses (NTL), which refer to losses caused by utility theft or meter errors. Typically, utility companies resort to machine learning solutions to automate and optimise the identification of such losses. This paper extends an existing NTL-detection...

Predictive Business Process Monitoring is becoming an essential aid for organizations, providing online operational support of their processes. This paper tackles the fundamental problem of equipping predictive business process monitoring with explanation capabilities, so that not only the what but also the why is reported when predicting generic K...

Implementing predictive models in utility companies to detect Non-Technical Losses (i.e. fraud and other meter problems) is challenging: the data available is biased, and the algorithms usually used are black-boxes that can not be either easily trusted or understood by the stakeholders. In this work, we explain our approach to mitigate these proble...

Computing a mapping between two process models is a crucial technique, since it enables reasoning and operating across processes, like providing a similarity score between two processes, or merging different process variants to generate a consolidated process model. In this paper we present a new flexible technique for process model mapping, based...

Organizations often have textual descriptions as a way to document their main processes. These descriptions are primarily used by the company’s personnel to understand the processes, specially for those ones that cannot interpret formal descriptions like BPMN or Petri nets. In this paper we present a technique based on Natural Language Processing a...

Predictive Business Process Monitoring is becoming an essential aid for organizations, providing online operational support of their processes. This paper tackles the fundamental problem of equipping predictive business process monitoring with explanation capabilities, so that not only the what but also the why is reported when predicting generic K...

State-of-the-art process discovery methods construct free-choice process models from event logs. Hence, the constructed models do not take into account indirect dependencies between events. Whenever the input behavior is not free-choice, these methods fail to provide a precise model. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the enhancement of...

Comparing business process variants using event logs is a common use case in process mining. Existing techniques for process variant analysis detect statistically-significant differences between variants at the level of individual entities (such as process activities) and their relationships (e.g. directly-follows relations between activities). Thi...

The alignment of observed and modeled behavior is an essential element for organizations, since it opens the door for conformance checking and enhancement of processes. The state-of-the-art technique for computing alignments has exponential time and space complexity, hindering its applicability for medium and large instances. In this article, a nov...

State-of-the-art process discovery methods construct free-choice process models from event logs. Hence, the constructed models do not take into account indirect dependencies between events. Whenever the input behavior is not free-choice, these methods fail to provide a precise model. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the enhancement of...

The creation of a process model faces the challenge of constructing a syntactically correct entity which accurately reflects the semantics of the reality, and is understandable. This paper proposes a framework called ${Model Judge}$ , focused towards the two main actors in the process of learning process model creation: novice modellers and instr...

Comparing business process variants using event logs is a common use case in process mining. Existing techniques for process variant analysis detect statistically-significant differences between variants at the level of individual entities (such as process activities) and their relationships (e.g. directly-follows relations between activities). Thi...

Processes are a crucial artefact in organizations, since they coordinate the execution of activities so that products and services are provided. The use of models to analyse the underlying processes is a well-known practice. However, due to the complexity and continuous evolution of their processes, organizations need an effective way of analysing...

Process mining seeks the confrontation between modeled behavior and observed behavior. In recent years, process mining techniques managed to bridge the gap between traditional model-based process analysis (e.g., simulation and other business process management techniques) and data-centric analysis techniques such as machine learning and data mining...

Business artifacts have appeared as a new paradigm to capture the information required for the complete execution and reasoning of a business process. Likewise, conformance checking is gaining popularity as a crucial technique that enables evaluating whether recorded executions of a process match its corresponding model. In this paper, conformance...

A fundamental problem in conformance checking is aligning event data with process models. Unfortunately, existing techniques for this task are either complex, or can only be applicable to restricted classes of models. This in practice means that for large inputs, current techniques often fail to produce a result. In this paper we propose a method t...

The existence of unstructured information that describes processes represents a challenge in organizations, mainly because this data cannot be directly referred into process-aware ecosystems due to ambiguities. Still, this information is important, since it encompasses aspects of a process that are left out when formalizing it on a particular model...

Relating event data and process models is becoming an important element for organizations. This paper presents a novel approach for aligning traces and process models. The approach is based on the structural theory of Petri nets (the marking equation), applied over an unfolding of the initial process model. Given an observed trace, the approach ado...

Process mining techniques use event logs containing real process executions in order to mine, align and extend process models. The partition of an event log into trace variants facilitates the understanding and analysis of traces, so it is a common pre-processing in process mining environments. Trace clustering automates this partition; traditional...

The effect of digital transformation in organizations needs to go beyond automation, so that human capabilities are also augmented. A possibility in this direction is to make formal representations of processes more accessible for the actors involved. On this line, this paper presents a methodology to transform a formal process description into a c...

The application of Artificial Intelligence techniques in industry equips companies with new essential tools to improve their principal processes. This is especially true for energy companies, as they have the opportunity, thanks to the modernization of their installations, to exploit a large amount of data with smart algorithms. In this work we exp...

Presents corrections to author names in the paper, “Jutge.org: Characteristics and experiences,” IEEE Trans. Learn. Technol., vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 321–333, Jul.–Sep. 2018.

Conformance checking strongly relies on the computation of artefacts, which enable reasoning on the relation between observed and modeled behavior. This paper shows how important conformance artefacts like alignments, anti-alignments or even multi-alignments, defined over the edit distance, can be computed by encoding the problem as a SAT instance....

Information systems, which are responsible for driving many processes in our lives (health care, the web, municipalities, commerce and business, among others), store information in the form of logs which is often left unused. Process mining, a discipline in between data mining and software engineering, proposes tailored algorithms to exploit the in...

This presentation is tailored with the paper "An Evolutionary Technique to Approximate Multiple Optimal Alignments" presented in Business Process Management conference (BPM 2018), Sydney, Australia 2018.

Process model descriptions are an ubiquitous source of information that exists in any organization. To reach different types of stakeholders, distinct descriptions are often kept, so that process understandability is boosted with respect to individual capabilities. While the use of distinct representations allows more stakeholders to interpret proc...

New and compelling regulations (e.g., the GDPR in Europe) impose tremendous pressure on organizations, in order to adhere to standard procedures, processes, and practices. The field of conformance checking aims to quantify the extent to which the execution of a process, captured within recorded corresponding event data, conforms to a given referenc...

The Business Process Management (BPM) field focuses in the coordination of labor so that organizational processes are smoothly executed in a way that products and services are properly delivered. At the same time, NLP has reached a maturity level that enables its widespread application in many contexts, thanks to publicly available frameworks. In t...

Fraud detection in energy consumption has proven to be a difficult problem for current techniques. In general, the approaches used in this area are restricted to compute a fraud score for each client based on its behaviour. The problem gets much more complicated on customers with no contract, since the company does not have enough information from...

The alignment of observed and modeled behavior is a pivotal issue in process mining because it opens the door for assessing the quality of a process model, as well as the usage of the model as a precise predictor for the execution of a process. This paper presents a novel technique for reduction of a process model based on the notion of indication,...

Several business-to-business and business-to-consumer services are provided as a human-to-human conversation in which the provider representative guides the conversation towards its resolution based on her experience, following internal guidelines. Several attempts to automatize these services are becoming popular, but they are currently limited to...

This chapter reflects on the principal role alignments have in the field of conformance checking. First it delves into various considerations on the optimality and uniqueness of alignments. Then, important aspects like visualization and properties of alignments are provided. Finally, the use of alignments to interpret fitness and precision metrics...

This chapter provides a general overview of the conformance checking field. First, it reports on the benefits conformance checking can bring for several digital transformation initiatives. Then the setting of conformance checking is defined, which encompass process modeling and execution. A motivation for applying conformance checking in organizati...

This chapter provides an overview of the current features and functional requirements of conformance checking software. First, it provides a tour for the conformance checking features of the ProM Framework. Then, it delves into the functional and non-functional requirements that conformance checking software in industry should incorporate.

This chapter introduces extensions and alternative techniques for computing alignments. Two different extensions are described first: multi-perspective alignments and online alignments. Then two techniques that represent alternatives to the technique presented in Chapter 7 are provided. Finally, the computation of alignments from two different proc...

The two main quality dimensions to relate modeled and recorded behavior are provided in this chapter: fitness and precision. To accomplish this, a description of the behavior of processes in a Venn diagram like fashion is provided, that will help both to understand these two quality dimensions, and to visualize the different types of deviations tha...

This chapter presents the main technique to align process models and event logs. First, it is shown how computing an alignment between a process model and a trace can be casted as finding execution sequences in the Petri net representing the synchronised product of these two elements. Then, a family of techniques is presented that are based on sear...

This chapter provides an overview of automated techniques that consider the use of the deviations detected in conformance checking to improve the processes. These techniques consider the automatic repair of process models and logs. Finally, a general view of the continuous application of conformance checking incorporating the aforementioned repair...

Several applications of the techniques presented in the previous chapters are described in this chapter. First, a gentle introduction to performance analysis is provided. Then, techniques for decision point analysis are reported. Finally, the two additional quality dimensions of generalization and simplicity are overviewed.

This chapter introduces the three main techniques that exist to relate modeled and recorded behavior: rule checking, token replay, and alignments. For each technique, a gentle introduction is provided so that the reader can understand its main features, as well as the conformance feedback that can be obtained by its application. Running examples ar...

This chapter defines on a intuitive level the two main elements for conformance checking: process models and event logs. The most important building blocks to create process models are first described. Then event logs, defined as the footprints of process executions, are introduced. Finally, languages are proposed as the common ground between proce...

This chapter formalizes process models and event logs, and discusses about the corresponding link between these two elements. First, event logs are presented as the outcome of process executions. Also, the standard for representing event logs is detailed. Then, process models are formalised as Petri nets, enabling for a clear execution semantics of...

This chapter provides the basic mathematical notation necessary to understand the theory and techniques presented in the next chapters.

This book introduces readers to the field of conformance checking as a whole and outlines the fundamental relation between modelled and recorded behaviour. Conformance checking interrelates the modelled and recorded behaviour of a given process and provides techniques and methods for comparing and analysing observed instances of a process in the pr...

A novel method to cluster event log traces is presented in this paper. In contrast to the approaches in the literature, the clustering approach of this paper assumes an additional input: a process model that describes the current process. The core idea of the algorithm is to use model traces as centroids of the clusters detected, computed from a ge...

Imposing access control onto workflows considerably reduces the set of users authorized to execute the workflow tasks. Further constraints (e.g. Separation of Duties) as well as unexpected unavailability of users may finally obstruct the successful workflow execution. To still complete the execution of an obstructed workflow, we envisage a hybrid a...

The discovery of a formal process model from event logs describing real process executions is a challenging problem that has been studied from several angles. Most of the contributions consider the extraction of a model as a one-class supervised learning problem where only a set of process instances is available. Moreover, the majority of technique...

Jutge.org is an open educational online programming judge designed for students and instructors, featuring a repository of problems that is well organized by courses, topics and difficulty. Internally, Jutge.org uses a secure and efficient architecture and integrates modern verification techniques, formal methods, static code analysis and data mini...

Certifying that a process model is aligned with the real process executions is perhaps the most desired feature a process model may have: aligned process models are crucial for organizations, since strategic decisions can be made easier on models instead of on plain data. In spite of its importance, the current algorithmic support for computing ali...

Certifying that a process model is aligned with the real process executions is perhaps the most desired feature a process model may have: aligned process models are crucial for organizations, since strategic decisions can be made easier on models instead of on plain data. In spite of its importance, the current algorithmic support for computing ali...

With the aim of having individuals from different backgrounds and expertise levels examine the operations in an organization, different representations of business processes are maintained. To have these different representations aligned is not only a desired feature, but also a real challenge due to the contrasting nature of each process represent...

Compatibility of components is an important issue in the quest for systems of systems that guarantee successful communications, free from message loss and indefinite waiting for inputs. In this paper, we investigate compatibility in the context of systems consisting of reactive components which may communicate through the synchronised execution of...

Nowadays organizations are experimenting a drift on the way processes are managed. On the one hand, formal notations like Petri nets or Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) enable the unambiguous reasoning and automation of designed processes. This way of eliciting processes by manual design, which stemmed decades ago, will still be an import...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2017, held in Barcelona, Spain, in September 2017. The 19 revised full papers papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 116 initial submissions. The topics selected by the authors demonstrate an increasing interest of the...

This book constitutes the proceedings of the BPM Forum from the International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2017, held in Barcelona, Spain, September 2017. The BPM Forum hosts innovative research which has a high potential of stimulating discussions. The papers selected for the forum are expected to showcase fresh ideas from exciti...

The alignment of observed and modeled behavior is a piv-otal issue in process mining because it opens the door for assessing the quality of a process model, as well as the usage of the model as a precise predictor for the execution of a process. This paper presents a novel technique for reduction of a process model based on the notion of indication...