Wil van der Aalst

Founding figure of process mining and one of the most cited researchers in BPM. Hub node across this wiki.

Authored works in this wiki

sources/2011-vanderaalst-process-mining-book — Process Mining: Data Science in Action (Springer, 1st ed. 2011, 2nd ed. 2016). The definitive textbook of the field; second foundational BPM textbook in this wiki alongside Dumas et al. 2018.
sources/2012-vanderaalst-process-mining-manifesto — led the IEEE Task Force authoring the Process Mining Manifesto; short rallying-call counterpart to the textbook. (stub, not deep-ingested — PDF not in raw/)
sources/2008-pesic-declare-manual — co-authored with Maja Pesic and Helen Schonenberg; prototype manual for the DECLARE declarative modelling language.

Role in the wider wiki

The APM Manifesto (sources/2026-calvanese-agentic-bpm-manifesto) positions itself explicitly as successor to the Process Mining Manifesto; Van der Aalst is the named predecessor even though he is not an APM author.

The entire raw/Predictive process monitoring/ corpus builds on Ch. 10 of his 2011/2016 textbook (concepts/operational-support — detect / predict / recommend).

Conceptual contributions attributed

Three types of process mining — discovery, conformance, enhancement.
Four quality dimensions — fitness, precision, generalisation, simplicity (concepts/process-model-quality).
Refined process mining framework (cartography / auditing / navigation × offline / online) — the concepts/process-mining-spectrum.
α-algorithm — the first foundational process-discovery algorithm.
Alignments — dominant modern concepts/conformance-checking technique.
Lasagna / Spaghetti characterisation — concepts/lasagna-spaghetti-processes.
Co-developed DECLARE and the declarative process-modelling tradition (concepts/declarative-process-modelling).
Advocated process mining 2.0 (insights → action) with Dumas — see sources/2021-dumas-process-mining-2-from-insights-to-action.

Affiliations

Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) — primary affiliation through the 2011/2016 book; Scientific Director of Data Science Center Eindhoven (DSC/e) from 2013. Later moved to RWTH Aachen University (Germany). Long-standing leadership of the ProM open-source platform and the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining.