Extending the MM-AR Metamodeling Platform with Process Mining Capabilities

Abstract

Process mining derives process models from event data recorded by information systems, but its results are usually presented as two-dimensional visualizations that are separate from the environments in which enterprise models are created and maintained. Metamodeling platforms for extended reality (XR), such as MM-AR, allow users to define modeling languages and to display models in 2D and 3D, but they do not provide access to event data or mining algorithms so far. In this paper we therefore present a first proof-of-concept for showing how an XR-based metamodeling platform can be extended with process discovery capabilities without changes to the platform core through a separate Python service based on the open source PM4Py process mining library. We demonstrate the approach using three common discovery algorithms for obtaining Petri nets and BPMN models based on CSV or XES event logs. A technical evaluation using four public event logs shows that the element counts of the created model instances match those of the PM4Py models in all 16 configurations. The integration adds between about 8 and 53 seconds per run, and this overhead grows with the size of the discovered model rather than the size of the event log. Although the prototype does not yet use the third dimension to encode process information, it established the foundations for studying such approaches.