---
title: Prescriptive Process Monitoring (PrPM)
type: concept
tags: [prpm, ppm, process-mining, prescriptive-analytics, intervention, runtime, hub]
sources: ["[[sources/2022-kubrak-prescriptive-ppm-slr]]", "[[sources/2014-groger-prescriptive-analytics-bpo]]", "[[sources/2021-dumas-process-mining-2-from-insights-to-action]]", "[[sources/2015-krumeich-prescriptive-control-business-processes]]"]
created: 2026-04-20
updated: 2026-05-11
---

# Prescriptive Process Monitoring (PrPM)

A family of runtime methods that **recommend interventions** during the execution of a business process case so as to optimise the process with respect to an explicit objective. Where [[concepts/predictive-process-monitoring|PPM]] stops at a forecast, PrPM closes the loop to **action**: predict that a case will run late, then also tell the worker *what to do* to prevent it.

Canonical SLR: [[sources/2022-kubrak-prescriptive-ppm-slr|Kubrak, Milani, Nolte & Dumas 2022]].
Earliest BPM articulations: [[sources/2014-groger-prescriptive-analytics-bpo|Gröger, Schwarz & Mitschang 2014]] (rBPO on a process warehouse) and [[sources/2015-krumeich-prescriptive-control-business-processes|Krumeich, Werth & Loos 2015]] (CEP / [[concepts/event-driven-bpm|event-driven BPM]] architecture for the process manufacturing industry).
Keynote vision: [[sources/2021-dumas-process-mining-2-from-insights-to-action|Dumas 2021]] — *Process Mining 2.0: From Insights to Action*.
Emerging LLM-based future direction: [[sources/2026-padella-llm-features-ppm|Padella, de Leoni & Dumas 2026]] explicitly flag a prescriptive extension of LLM-PPM as next work.

## Position in the analytics spectrum

PrPM occupies the prescriptive cell of the **descriptive → predictive → prescriptive** analytics pyramid. In [[concepts/process-mining-spectrum|van der Aalst's refined process-mining framework]] (cartography / auditing / **navigation** × offline / online), PrPM is Navigation × Online: the model is used to guide a *live* journey, not just audit a past one. [[concepts/operational-support]] (detect / predict / recommend) is the nearest precursor name van der Aalst used for the same cell.

PrPM is also the BPM-flavoured instance of what other disciplines call **process control**. Distinct from chemical-engineering process control ([[sources/2007-bao-lee-process-control-passivity]]) and statistical process control — same word, very different machinery.

## The six-dimensional framework (Kubrak et al. 2022)

Every PrPM method can be characterised along:

| Dimension | Typical options |
|---|---|
| **Performance objective** | Optimise case outcome (desired label probability) · Optimise efficiency (cycle/processing time, resource utilisation) |
| **Performance metric** | Cycle time, processing time, defect rate, revenue, deadline violations, cost |
| **Intervention type** | Control-flow (next activity, alarm, path change) · Resource (assign / reassign) · Data (rarely) |
| **Modeling technique** | Nearest-neighbour / similarity; decision tree; classical ML; LSTM; RL (online and offline); causal / uplift trees |
| **Data inputs** | Control-flow, resource, temporal, domain-specific |
| **Intervention policy** | *when* and *to whom* — see [[concepts/intervention-policy]] |

Orthogonal axes on interventions:
- **Frequency** — continuous (every step) vs discrete (only when triggered).
- **Purpose** — optimizing (KPI-driven; may be correlation- or causality-based) vs guiding (similarity to historical traces).

## Research gaps (Kubrak et al. 2022)

1. **In-vivo validation** — most evaluations are historical back-tests; field deployments remain rare.
2. **Intervention discovery** — no principled method to *mine* candidate interventions from logs; they are hand-specified.
3. **Causal policies** — policies that account for cause-effect and second-order effects are the emerging frontier ([[concepts/causal-process-discovery]]).
4. **Explainability and feedback loops** between a PrPM system and its end-users.
5. **Dimension coverage** — temporal metrics dominate; quality, compliance, revenue under-served.
6. **Terminology** — "proactive adaptation", "next-step recommendation", "next best action", "on-the-fly resource allocation" coexist; a common vocabulary is needed.

## Method lineage (representative)

- **Correlation-based, tree-driven** — [[sources/2014-groger-prescriptive-analytics-bpo|Gröger et al. 2014]] (rBPO).
- **CEP + Bayesian-network architecture for process manufacturing** — [[sources/2015-krumeich-prescriptive-control-business-processes|Krumeich, Werth & Loos 2015]]; introduces Event-Driven Predictive Analytics (EDPA) and a 4-component / 5-layer enterprise architecture. German steel-industry case study.
- **Alarm-based** — Teinemaa, Tax, de Leoni, Dumas, Maggi 2018 *(referenced-not-ingested)*; Fahrenkrog-Petersen et al. 2022 ("Fire now, fire later").
- **Online reinforcement learning** — Metzger, Kley & Palm 2020.
- **Causal-inference / uplift** — Bozorgi, Teinemaa, Dumas, La Rosa, Polyvyanyy 2021; Shoush & Dumas 2021.
- **Predicted-loyalty queue prioritisation** — Paper III of [[sources/2023-riess-phd-thesis-ppm|Riess 2023 PhD thesis]] (with Scholderer): uses predicted cycle time to predict NPS outcomes and dynamically re-prioritise a customer-service queue. Evaluated via calibrated agent-based simulation on a European telecom. Collapses to FCFS once a 60-hour service-level constraint is enforced. *(Submitted to Decision Support Systems; not independently ingested as a source.)*
- **LLM-based (emerging, 2026)** — flagged as future work by [[sources/2026-padella-llm-features-ppm|Padella, de Leoni & Dumas 2026]]; would extend [[concepts/llm-based-ppm|LLM-PPM]] from forecast to recommendation. No concrete LLM-PrPM paper ingested in the wiki yet.

## Design-time predecessor

Before runtime, data-driven interventions, BPM already had a design-time, expert-driven catalogue of process improvements: the [[concepts/bpr-heuristics]] ([[sources/2005-reijers-limanmansar-best-practices-bpr|Reijers & Liman Mansar 2005]]). PrPM can be read as the **runtime, per-case, data-driven successor** to this catalogue. Both share the [[concepts/devils-quadrangle]] as evaluation scaffolding.

## Connections to APM

The APM Manifesto ([[sources/2026-calvanese-agentic-bpm-manifesto]]) positions PrPM techniques as what an agent invokes when playing the **Recommend** role of [[concepts/conversational-actionability]]. PrPM also supplies the **adaptation trigger** signal feeding [[concepts/self-modification]].

## Related

[[concepts/predictive-process-monitoring]] · [[concepts/llm-based-ppm]] · [[concepts/event-driven-bpm]] · [[concepts/intervention-policy]] · [[concepts/operational-support]] · [[concepts/process-mining-spectrum]] · [[concepts/causal-process-discovery]] · [[concepts/interventionist-theory-of-causation]] · [[concepts/bpr-heuristics]] · [[concepts/devils-quadrangle]] · [[syntheses/ppm-landscape]] · [[syntheses/prescriptive-process-monitoring-lineage]]