Remaining time prediction for business processes with concurrency based on log representation

Remaining time prediction of business processes plays an important role in resource scheduling and plan making. The structural features of single process instance and the concurrent running of multiple process instances are the main factors that affect the accuracy of the remaining time prediction. Existing prediction methods does not take full advantage of these two aspects into consideration. To address this issue, a new prediction method based on trace representation is proposed. More specifically, we first associate the prefix set generated by the event log to different states of the transition system, and encode the structural features of the prefixes in the state. Then, an annotation containing the feature representation for the prefix and the corresponding remaining time are added to each state to obtain an extended transition system. Next, states in the extended transition system are partitioned by the different lengths of the states, which considers concurrency among multiple process instances. Finally, the long short-term memory (LSTM) deep recurrent neural networks are applied to each partition for predicting the remaining time of new running instances. By extensive experimental evaluation using synthetic event logs and reallife event logs, we show that the proposed method outperforms existing baseline methods.