White-box prediction of process performance indicators via flow analysis

Predictive business process monitoring methods exploit historical process execution logs to provide predictions about running instances of a process, which enable process workers and managers to preempt performance issues or compliance violations. A number of approaches have been proposed to predict quantitative process performance indicators, such as remaining cycle time, cost, or probability of deadline violation. However, these approaches adopt a black-box approach, insofar as they predict a single scalar value without decomposing this prediction into more elementary components. In this paper, we propose a white-box approach to predict performance indicators of running process instances. The key idea is to first predict the performance indicator at the level of activities, and then to aggregate these predictions at the level of a process instance by means of flow analysis techniques. The paper specifically develops this idea in the context of predicting the remaining cycle time of ongoing process instances. The proposed approach has been evaluated on four real-life event logs and compared against several baselines.