An XES Extension for the Distributed Simulation of Process Collaborations

Process Mining (PM) has emerged as a valuable method for understanding, analyzing, and improving business processes (BPs) through event data recorded in system logs. PM techniques offer deep insights into past process executions and effectively support BP monitoring and enhancement. The integrated use of PM and Modeling & Simulation in a so-called predictive process mining paradigm is recognized as a promising approach to develop advanced business process management strategies. This paper focuses on the simulation-based analysis of process collaborations. Specifically, this paper proposes the Distributed Systems extension, a novel extension of the XES standard to represent event data, tailored to address the challenges of capturing complex process models in distributed environments and supporting distributed simulation of BPs. In order to clarify the advantages brought by the proposed extension, the paper also introduces a method for PPM-based analysis of BP collaborations and discusses an example application.