Discovering Guard Stage Milestone Models Through Hierarchical Clustering

Processes executed on enterprise Information Systems (IS), such as ERP and CMS, are artifact-centric. The execution of these processes is driven by the creation and evolution of business entities called artifacts. Several artifact-centric modeling languages were proposed to capture the specificity of these processes. One of the most used artifact-centric modeling languages is the Guard Stage Milestone (GSM) language. It represents an artifact-centric process as an information model and a lifecycle. The lifecycle groups activities in stages with data conditions as guards. The hierarchy between the stages is based on common conditions. However, existing works do not discover this hierarchy nor the data conditions, as they considered them to be already available. They also do not discover GSM models directly from event logs. They discover Petri nets and translate them into GSM models. To fill this gap, we propose in this paper a discovery approach based on hierarchical clustering. We use invariants detection to discover data conditions and information gain of common conditions to cluster stages. The approach does not rely on domain knowledge nor translation mechanisms. It was implemented and evaluated using a blockchain case study.