On the Hybrid Nature of ABPMS Process Frames and its Implications on Automated Process Discovery

A core component of any AI-Augmented Business Process Management System (ABPMS) is the process frame, which gives the system process-awareness and defines its maximal behavioral boundaries. Compared to traditional process models, the process frame should, in principle, provide a somewhat more permissive representation of the managed processes, such that the (semi) autonomous behavior of an ABPMS, referred to as framed autonomy, could emerge. In addition, the process frame is not limited to a single linguistic or symbolic formalism and may incorporate heterogeneous knowledge ranging from predefined procedures to common sense rules and best practices. In this paper, we first conceptualize the ABPMS process frame as a hybrid business process representation, consisting of semi-concurrently executed procedural and declarative process models, extending the open-world assumption of the declarative paradigm also to procedural models. The latter allows any set of (non-conflicting) models of either type to be combined for execution, but complicates the automated discovery of these models from event data. Existing approaches for procedural models are particularly affected due to their reliance on observing directly-follows relations between pairs of activities. In search of an alternative, we present an in-depth analysis of how different procedural behaviors manifest as sets of discovered Declare constraints, each corresponding to a specific type of eventually-follows relation. This reveals behavioral overlaps between declarative and procedural models, while also laying the foundation for developing corresponding process (frame) discovery techniques.