Reasoning-based Techniques for Dealing with Incomplete Business Process Execution Traces

The growing adoption of IT systems to support business activities, and the consequent capability to monitor the actual execution of business processes, has brought to the diffusion of business analysis monitoring (BAM) tools, and of reasoning services standing on top of them. However, in the majority of real settings, due to the different degrees of abstraction and to information hiding, the IT-level monitoring of a process execution may only bring incomplete information concerning the process-level activities and associated artifacts. This may hinder the ability to reason about process instances and executions, and must be coped with. This paper presents a novel reasoning-based approach to recover missing information about process executions, relying on a logical formulation in terms of a satisfiability problem. Ongoing experiments show encouraging results. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.