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Mining Agents’ Goals in Agent-Oriented Business Processes

Published: 29 December 2014 Publication History

Abstract

When designing a business process, individual agents are assigned to perform tasks based on certain goals (i.e., designed process goals). However, based on their own interests, real-world agents often have different goals (i.e., agents’ goals) and thus may behave differently than designed, often resulting in reduced effectiveness or efficiencies of the executed process. Moreover, existing business process research lacks effective methods for discovering agents’ goals in the actual execution of the designed business processes. To address this problem, we propose an agent-oriented goal mining approach to modeling, discovering, and analyzing agents’ goals in executed business processes using historical event logs and domain data. To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to adopt the agents’ goal perspective to study inconsistencies between the design and execution of business processes. Moreover, it also provides a useful tool for stakeholders to discover real-world agents’ actual goals and thus provides insights for improving the task assignment mechanism or business process design in general.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Process Mining: A Guide for PractitionersResearch Challenges in Information Science10.1007/978-3-031-05760-1_16(265-282)Online publication date: 14-May-2022
  • (2021)Detecting Roles of Money Laundering in Bitcoin Mixing Transactions: A Goal Modeling and Mining FrameworkFrontiers in Physics10.3389/fphy.2021.6653999Online publication date: 6-Jul-2021
  • (2019)From event logs to goals: a systematic literature review of goal-oriented process miningRequirements Engineering10.1007/s00766-018-00308-325:1(67-93)Online publication date: 7-Jan-2019
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      Published In

      cover image ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems
      ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems  Volume 5, Issue 4
      Special Issue on Business Process Intelligence
      March 2015
      236 pages
      ISSN:2158-656X
      EISSN:2158-6578
      DOI:10.1145/2677016
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 29 December 2014
      Accepted: 01 April 2014
      Revised: 01 March 2014
      Received: 01 May 2013
      Published in TMIS Volume 5, Issue 4

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      Author Tags

      1. Goal mining
      2. agent-oriented business process
      3. belief-desire-intention model

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      • Research-article
      • Research
      • Refereed

      Funding Sources

      • University Research Priority Program URPP Social Networks of the University of Zurich
      • Forschungskredit der Universität Zürich - Postdoc
      • Hong Kong Government
      • “Fonds zur Förderung des Akademischen Nachwuchses (FAN)” of Zürcher Universitätsverein (ZUNIV)
      • Science and Innovation Commission, Shenzhen
      • Research Grants Council, University Grants Committee, Hong Kong

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      Cited By

      View all
      • (2022)Process Mining: A Guide for PractitionersResearch Challenges in Information Science10.1007/978-3-031-05760-1_16(265-282)Online publication date: 14-May-2022
      • (2021)Detecting Roles of Money Laundering in Bitcoin Mixing Transactions: A Goal Modeling and Mining FrameworkFrontiers in Physics10.3389/fphy.2021.6653999Online publication date: 6-Jul-2021
      • (2019)From event logs to goals: a systematic literature review of goal-oriented process miningRequirements Engineering10.1007/s00766-018-00308-325:1(67-93)Online publication date: 7-Jan-2019
      • (2019)Goal-oriented Process Enhancement and DiscoveryBusiness Process Management10.1007/978-3-030-26619-6_9(102-118)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2019
      • (2018)Discovering role interaction models in the Emergency Room using Process MiningJournal of Biomedical Informatics10.1016/j.jbi.2017.12.01578(60-77)Online publication date: Feb-2018

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