In recent years, the industry has been witnessing an extended usage of process mining and automated event data analysis. Consequently, there is a rising significance in addressing privacy apprehensions related to the inclusion of sensitive and private information within event data utilized by process mining algorithms. State-of-the-art research mainly focuses on providing quantifiable privacy guarantees, e.g., via differential privacy, for trace variants that are used by the main process mining techniques, e.g., process discovery. However, privacy preservation techniques designed for the release of trace variants are still insufficient to meet all the demands of industry-scale utilization. Moreover, ensuring privacy guarantees in situations characterized by a high occurrence of infrequent trace variants remains a challenging endeavor. In this paper, we introduce two novel approaches for releasing differentially private trace variants based on trained generative models. With TraVaG, we leverage Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to sample from a privatized implicit variant distribution. Our second method employs Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models that reconstruct artificial trace variants from noise via trained Markov chains. Both methods offer industry-scale benefits and elevate the degree of privacy assurances, particularly in scenarios featuring a substantial prevalence of infrequent variants. Also, they overcome the shortcomings of conventional privacy preservation techniques, such as bounding the length of variants and introducing fake variants. Experimental results on real-life event data demonstrate that our approaches surpass state-of-the-art techniques in terms of privacy guarantees and utility preservation.

Conformance checking is a crucial aspect of process mining, where the main objective is to compare the actual execution of a process, as recorded in an event log, with a reference process model, e.g., in the form of a Petri net or a BPMN. Conformance checking enables identifying deviations, anomalies, or non-compliance instances. It offers different perspectives on problems in processes, bottlenecks, or process instances that are not compliant with the model. Performing conformance checking in federated (inter-organizational) settings allows organizations to gain insights into the overall process execution and to identify compliance issues across organizational boundaries, which facilitates process improvement efforts among collaborating entities. In this paper, we propose a privacy-aware federated conformance-checking approach that allows for evaluating the correctness of overall cross-organizational process models, identifying miscommunications , and quantifying their costs. For evaluation, we design and simulate a supply chain process with three organizations engaged in purchase-to-pay, order-to-cash, and shipment processes. We generate synthetic event logs for each organization as well as the complete process, and we apply our approach to identify and evaluate the cost of pre-injected miscommunications.

Process simulation assesses the impact of changing environmental parameters on a process. To obtain realistic simulation models, process mining techniques can be deployed for a log-based discovery. Such discovery techniques usually rely on a fixed case notion, falling short in capturing the entangled nature of real organizational processes as an interplay of objects and subprocesses. Yet there is a need for such methods, given the requirement for information systems to foresee and adapt to changing environments in an online setting and in a holistic manner. In this work, we approach this research need by elaborating a method for simulation model discovery that is based on the object-centricity paradigm. To implement object-centric simulation, some intrinsic challenges have to be overcome. These include, first, the parametrizable generation of sets of objects having predefined interrelations that structure possible behavior. Second, the generated objects have to be synchronized and routed through a control-flow model. We outline these challenges, describe our solution approach, and evaluate the quality of both object generation and behavior.