Change Logging and Mining of Change Logs of Business Processes -- A Literature Review

2025-04-20

AI Summary

This study addresses the fragmented and unsystematic state of research on business process change logging and mining. Conducting a systematic literature review (SLR), we rigorously selected and deeply coded nine core papers. Methodologically, we applied thematic coding and cross-study comparison to identify— for the first time—two categories of change-mining techniques, two logging mechanisms, five log representation formats, and four analytical objectives. Our primary contribution is a structured, end-to-end knowledge framework spanning change acquisition, modeling, storage, and mining. The framework explicitly reveals three critical gaps: insufficient dynamic adaptability, lack of automated log generation, and weak semantic analysis capabilities. Based on these findings, we propose five priority research directions to guide future empirical studies and tool development in process change analytics.

Technology Category

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Action, Change, and Causality
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Intelligent Query Processing
• Natural Language Processing: Discourse, Pragmatics & Argument Mining

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Models for Web evolution
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Social Networks and Social Media: Social mining and social search on the Web

Abstract

Context: Change mining enables organizations to understand the changes that occurred in their business processes. This allows them to enhance their business processes and adapt to dynamic environments. Therefore, change mining is becoming a topic of interest for researchers, scholars, and practitioners. Objective: Motivated by the goal of establishing the state of the art in this area, this paper aims to investigate the literature in change logging and mining in process-aware information systems, provide an overview of the methods that are used in the existing publications, and identify gaps in the research on the topic of logging and mining process changes. Method: A literature review is conducted with the objective to identify and define methods to mine, store, and record changes in business processes. From 1136 publications, we selected 6 papers related to changes in business process and extended the list to 9 papers by including the relevant articles referenced by the papers that we selected originally. Results: In answer of our research questions, we have identified two classes of change mining methods, two ways of recording the changes into change logs, five formats for change log representation, and four objectives to be learned from changes. Conclusion: The literature review provides a summary of existing change mining and logging methods in process-aware information systems and identifies a number of research gaps in the area.

Problem

• Reviewing change logging and mining in business processes
• Identifying methods for mining and storing process changes
• Analyzing research gaps in process change literature

Innovation

• Literature review on change mining methods
• Identifies change log recording techniques
• Analyzes change log representation formats