Combining Process Mining and Simulation to Guide Users Towards Process Improvement in mpmX

Process mining and simulation can be a powerful combination to analyze and improve business processes. While process mining is commonly applied to analyze past process executions (as-is process), simulation allows a user to explore process executions, which might occur in the future (to-be process). Yet, the combination of process mining and simulation is not commonly used in practice. We see two main reasons for this, which we attempt to solve: (1) missing tool support for the creation and execution of process simulations based on event logs, (2) missing guidance for the user-based adaptation of simulation scenarios. Hence, we are introducing a simulation extension to the Mehrwerk ProcessMining software mpmX, which on the one hand enables the automatic discovery and execution of process simulation models based on an event log, while at the same time providing suggestions for the creation of alternative simulation scenarios. The simulation scenarios thereby cover a subset of the discovered process variants from the as-is process and enable a user to analyze the change in process performance based on a more standardized process.