When to Invoke a Prediction Service for Business Process Monitoring?

Predictive monitoring of business processes aims at forecasting the future information of a business process and has gained increasing attention in recent years. With the development of cloud computing, prediction models, including remaining time prediction models, can be provided as cloud services. Reducing the number of invocation times of a remaining time prediction service is necessary since a large quantity of business process instances may be initiated and monitored every day. However, most of the current research focuses on designing new algorithms to improve prediction accuracy but there is no approach available to decide when to invoke a prediction service for each business process instance. In this article, we propose a deep reinforcement learning based strategy that can learn the policies of selecting prediction points for the remaining time prediction. Specifically, the learned policies can dynamically decide the next prediction point at which the remaining time prediction service will be invoked for a business process instance. We performed extensive experiments on five real-world datasets. The experiment results show this strategy can reduce the number of prediction points significantly and still maintain the high prediction accuracy.