Process Discovery

The act of eliciting a process model from reality — translating tacit organisational knowledge into an explicit representation (sources/2018-dumas-fundamentals-of-bpm, ch. 5).

Three intrinsic challenges (§5.1.2)

Fragmented process knowledge — no single person holds the full process.
Thinking-in-cases — domain experts describe the common path but not variants/exceptions.
Analyst vs domain-expert gap — analysts know modelling conventions; experts know the work.

Two flavours

Human-driven discovery — methods/process-discovery-methods (evidence / interview / workshop-based).
Automated discovery — process mining from event logs (α-algorithm and successors; ch. 11).

Imperative vs declarative discovery

Automated discovery bifurcates by target language: imperative (Petri nets / BPMN via α, Inductive, Heuristics, Split Miner) vs declarative (DECLARE / ConDec models via Declare Miner, MINERful, DisCoveR). See frameworks/declare and concepts/declarative-process-modelling; the original tool is documented in sources/2008-pesic-declare-manual.

Method selection

Choice depends on process complexity, access to domain experts, existence of an event log, and required granularity.

Output quality

Governed by concepts/process-model-quality (syntactic / semantic / pragmatic).

concepts/bpm-lifecycle · methods/process-discovery-methods · methods/process-mining-basics · concepts/process-model-quality