Applying organizational mining to discover agent systems from event data

Agent system mining is a recently introduced type of process mining that takes a bottom-up approach to the data-driven analysis of socio-technical systems that execute business processes in organizations. Instead of the top-down approach used in conventional process mining that studies a system in terms of its global state evolution, agent system mining analyzes the system as if it is composed of autonomous agents, each with its local state and behavior, interacting with other agents and the environment to contribute to the emerging global behavior of the business process. Recently, Agent Miner, the first algorithm for discovering agent systems from event data generated by process-aware information systems, has been proposed. The quality of the agent systems discovered by this algorithm depends on the quality of the agent types (or agents), which are identified from the available information about agent instances in the data. In this paper, we study the suitability and benefits of using methods from the organizational mining subarea of process mining for identifying agent types. The experiments we conduct over real-world datasets confirm the usefulness of such methods for discovering simple, modular, and accurate agent systems. These conclusions are grounded in quality metrics such as the size of discovered models (simplicity), Louvain modularity and the Gini coefficient (modularity), and precision and recall (accuracy). The results confirm the benefits of using organizational mining for identifying agent types when discovering agent systems from event data, leading to the construction of models of superior quality in precision, recall, and simplicity compared to models constructed by state-of-the-art conventional process discovery algorithms.