The BPM community can certainly benefit from the adoption of open science principles. The availability of business process models and logs can make BPM research results more controllable, replicable, and comparable. Unfortunately, nfiding suitable collections of models and logs is pretty dificult to validate research proposals in the BPM field. To address this issue, we have developed a web-based repository, named RePROSitory, for sharing business process models and logs making them accessible to the community. We have started to systematically populate the repository with a collection of business process models, selected from the literature, and business process logs from an Italian company. The experience of models and logs retrieval from RePROSitory is enhanced by using metrics and metadata that allow researchers to select from RePROSitory a set of models or logs that they judge more suitable for the experiments they want to run.
RePROSitory was born [
Referring to process models collections, the most known are BPM Academic Initiative Model Collection1 and Camunda BPMN for Research.2 These collections are of great value for the entire BPM community, as they make available a huge amount of models that anyone can access to support their studies. In ⋆ Copyright ' 2021 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative
Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
1 https://bpmai.org
2 https://github.com/camunda/bpmn-for-research
the past, we used them for validating our research work (e.g., the framework
in [
Referring to business process logs, few repositories are available and they mainly refer to the work carried out by the Process Mining Group at the Eindhoven University of Technology.3 The main collection of logs they refer includes over 40 logs released by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining on the data.4tu.nl platform.4 Between the hosted logs we must mention those related to the International Business Process Intelligence Challenge,5 a competition that provides participants with a real-life event log and, by applying any possible available technique, challenges them to analyze it and extract insights useful from a business perspective. With no doubt the data.4tu.nl platform is, and it has been, of great value for the research community; a simple query on Google Scholar, at the time of writing, results in a total of 562 scientific contributions mentioning and referring to data-sets available on such a platform. Not only datasets related to business processes are available on data.4tu.nl, but also data-sets related to Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Biology and many other subjects, making it a general purpose repository.
What we present with RePROSitory is a dedicated platform for the sharing of business process related material, such as models and logs, with the possibility of taking advantage of specific functionalities that allow querying and filtering models and logs based on metadata and metrics. These functionalities allow therefore to define shareable collections of models and logs. In addition, we provide the possibility to correlate models and logs, in such a way to be able to inspect models related to specific logs, and logs related to specific models.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the RePROSitory platform’s main features. Section 3 reports about the maturity of the platform and Section 4 concludes the paper and provides indications for future work. 2
In the following, we provide an overview of the main RePROSitory’s functionalities that easily enable the sharing and the fruition of business process models and logs.
RPREPROSITORY
Homepage My Contribution Uploaded List Uploaded Logs 6 Most Downloaded Logs
Log Name Order_to_cash.xes Nuova At ivita.xes
Downloads 16 11
Latest Uploaded Logs
Log Name Order_to_cash.xes
Upload Date 2020-12-29T18:30:3 repairExample.xes 2020-12-28T13:26:0
RePROSitory’s homepage (shown in Figure 1) provides a summary of the platform content (i.e., number of present models and logs, number of downloads, etc.) and allows user to access the platform functionalities by means of a sidebar. The platform provides two kinds of access: as guest and as registered user. A guest user can access functionalities such as: Uploaded List to see the lists of models and logs uploaded on the platform and eventually export them; Search to navigate models and logs; and Info to access the descriptions of metadata and supported metrics used to describe models and logs. A registered user, in addition to the guest’s functionalities, can contribute to the platform by designing models and uploading models and logs, and by defining collections of models or logs shareable via URL addresses. The user can directly Design a Model by means of the integrated bpmn-js6 library and decide to upload it, together with some metadata, directly on the RePROSitory platform. The user can choose to Upload models or logs together with related information (e.g., source, type, application domain). In the case of a log, when the log is uploaded a Log Metrics Extractor component is called. It computes the values for log metrics, which constitute the parameters a user can tune for filtering logs, and it shows the resulting values to the user. These results are also made available for the download in the form of a .json file. Up to now, the list of metrics for log includes: Total Number of Traces, Average Week Duration, Median Week Duration, Start Date, End Date, Minimum Week Duration of a Trace and Maximum Week Duration of a Trace. In the case of a model, two components are invoked when the model is uploaded: BPMN Metrics Extractor and BPMN Model Validator. The former component computes values for business process model
Metrics for Nuova RDA.xes Metric Name Log Name Total Number of Traces Number of Events Log Start Log End Min Week Duration Max Week Duration Avg Week Duration Median Week Duration
Value Nuova RDA.xes 154 2522 Mon Jun 05 16:57:00 TCuEeSFTe2b02177 14:49:00 C0ET 2018 214.9 2.9 0
Log’s Information for Nuova RDA.xes ID 3_1592583009243_1126183410912322 Uploaded By fabrizio.fornari@unicam.it Uploaded Date 2020-06-19T16:10:09.000Z Name Nuova RDA.xes Description This log refers to a purchasing order process of an Italian company.
Language Italian Scope Research Originality New Log Format XES Application Domain Order Management Type Process
Origin Real Case metrics, whose results are made available for the download in the form of a .json ifle; the latter component checks if the BPMN syntax has been properly used, thus ensuring that no violation of the BPMN standard is present. The result of this syntactic check is stored into the database. Both results from the two components constitute, together with the information provided by the user, the parameters that can be tuned for filtering models.
It is worth noticing that with the Search functionality, RePROSitory provides three diferent ways of filtering models or logs: by metadata, by metric values, and by a combination of both metadata and metric values. Filtering by metadata allows the user to apply a filter based on information, such as id, source, name, year, type, application domain, etc. Filtering by metrics allows the user to specify customized parameters based on model metrics. A combination of comparison operators and values is used for each considered metric. Once all the desired filters have been applied and a search is requested, the models or logs that satisfy the parameters are returned. The user can then inspect, download or remove models or logs from the resulting list. Upon pressing the download button, the user is able to download a .zip archive containing the selected material and the extracted metrics. A registered user can also define collections of models or logs from the result of a search operation and make them accessible via URL address.
The platform is accessible at http://pros.unicam.it/reprository together with a detailed User Guide explaining how to use RePROSitory.A screencast is available on http://pros.unicam.it/video/reprository/rp2; it shows a typical user experience on the platform. 3
Since the first release of RePROSitory (March 2019), the number of models shared on the platform has grown from 174 to 570. The number of registered users detected on July 2021 is 44; based on the users declared afiliation we estimated that over 80% of them are students and researchers of European Universities, the remaining 20% did not explicitly specified an afiliation.
In [
For what concerns process logs, we started by distributing four real logs coming from an Italian consulting company. The log named Help-Desk reports the activities related to an help-desk process where a consultant provides support and indications to a client in a telematic way. The log named Nuova RDA reports about activities that an employee of the company performs for requesting the purchase of a new PC, a server, or a new hardware device to the company manager who is in charge of approving or denying the request based on the actual necessity and based on the budget. The log named Nuova Attiviat` reports the process related to an employee of the company that needs to perform an internal activity (e.g., sending a fax, an e-mail, or performing an investment). The log named Dismissione reports the company internal activities that an employee performs for disposing of an old PC, a server or any other hardware device. By means of the new functionalities available on RePROSitory we have been able to upload such logs on the platform together with metadata describing the uploaded logs. The platform, by means of the LogMetricsExtractor component, automatically computes some metrics (e.g., number of traces, time of start, time of end, min, max, average and median week duration of traces ) that can be used to filter logs stored on the platform. An example on how those metrics and metadata are displayed is reported in Figure 2. In addition, with the new possibility of creating collections of models or logs, we have been able to share the uploaded logs via a URL address.7
The possibility of uploading and sharing logs on RePROSitory enables new
usage scenarios. In fact, the logs stored on RePROSitory can be for instance
downloaded by a researcher who is conducting a study over BPMN process
mining algorithms. The researcher can perform some tests and share on
RePROSitory the resulting models documenting them appropriately filling the model
upload form, linking them to the origin log, and making them available to the
entire community. As an example, we applied the Split Mining algorithm (one
of the many process mining algorithms [
Nuovca/aRDA
Verifche
Consegna Efetuata Rifuto
Business Process models and logs are not easily accessible. This hinders the possibility to validate and compare research approaches extensively. We developed RePROSitory, a platform for sharing and retrieving business process models and logs to overcome this issue. RePROSitory is on continuous development. We are working to improve the platform’s usability and add new functionalities, especially related to process log visualization. We are also planning to extend the set of available models conducting harvesting procedures from the literature and conducting BPM projects with companies to derive and share real-life models and logs.