EdgeAlpha: Distributed Process Discovery at the Data Sources
<|reference_start|>EdgeAlpha: Distributed Process Discovery at the Data Sources: Process Mining is moving beyond mining traditional event logs and nowadays includes, for example, data sourced from sensors in the Internet of Things (IoT) in a smart home, factory or hospital setting. The volume and velocity of data generated by such sensors makes it increasingly challenging for traditional process discovery algorithms to store and mine such data in traditional event logs. Further, privacy considerations often prevent data collection at a central location in the first place. To address this challenge, this paper introduces EdgeAlpha, an algorithm for distributed process discovery operating directly on sensor nodes on a stream of real-time event data. Based on the Alpha Miner, EdgeAlpha tracks each event and its predecessor and successor events directly on the sensor node where the event is sensed and recorded. From this local view, each node in EdgeAlpha derives a partial footprint matrix, which we then merge at a central location, whenever we query the system to compute a process model. Our analysis shows that even with over 600 activities, like in the Hospital Log, the average number of predecessors per activity remains below 7. This enables efficient determination of predecessors for each event, reducing the communication overhead by up to 96% compared to querying all nodes and enhancing scalability. Additionally, our analysis demonstrates that the number of queried nodes stabilizes after relatively few events, and batching predecessor queries in groups of 40 reduces the average queried nodes per event to less than 2.5%. EdgeAlpha ensures that the resulting process model is identical to the original Alpha Miner.<|reference_end|>
@article{andersen2024edgeminer:,
    title={EdgeMiner: Distributed Process Mining at the Data Sources},
    author={Julia Andersen, Patrick Rathje, Christian Imenkamp, Agnes Koschmider,
  Olaf Landsiedel},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.03426},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2405.03426},
    primaryClass={cs.DB cs.DC}
}