A Process Mining Method for Inter-organizational Business Process Integration

Business process integration (BPI) allows organizations to connect and automate their business processes in order to deliver the right economic resources at the right time, place, and price. BPI requires the integration of business processes and their supporting systems across multiple autonomous organizations. However, such integration is complex and can face coordination complexities that occur during the resource exchanges between the partners’ processes. This article proposes a new method called Process Mining for Business Process Integration (PM4BPI) that helps process designers to perform BPI by creating new process models that cross the boundaries of multiple organizations from a collection of process event logs. PM4BPI uses federated process mining techniques to detect incompatibilities before the integration of the partners’ processes. Then, it applies process adaptation patterns to solve detected incompatibilities. Finally, organizations’ processes are merged to build a collaborative process model that crosses the organizations’ boundaries. AdaptWF_Net, an extension of a Petri net, is used to design inter-organizational business processes and adaptation patterns. An integrated care pathway is used as a case study to assess the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed method.