Predictive monitoring of business processes is a subfield of process mining that aims to predict, among other things, the characteristics of the next event or the sequence of the next events. Although multiple approaches based on deep learning have been proposed, mainly recurrent neural networks and convolutional neural networks, none of them really exploit the structural information available in process models. This paper proposes an approach that simultaneously learns spatio-temporal information from both the event log and the process model by combining recurrent neural networks with graph convolutional networks. Thus, common patterns from process models, such as loops or parallels, can be learned while avoiding overwriting information during the encoding phase. An experimental evaluation of real-life event logs shows that our approach is more consistent and outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches.

Predictive monitoring of business processes is concerned with the prediction of ongoing cases on a business process. Lately, the popularity of deep learning techniques has propitiated an ever-growing set of approaches focused on predictive monitoring based on these techniques. However, the high disparity of process logs and experimental setups used to evaluate these approaches makes it especially difficult to make a fair comparison. Furthermore, it also difficults the selection of the most suitable approach to solve a specific problem. In this paper, we provide both a systematic literature review of approaches that use deep learning to tackle the predictive monitoring tasks. In addition, we performed an exhaustive experimental evaluation of 10 different approaches over 12 publicly available process logs.