Fourth International Business Process Intelligence Challenge (BPIC’14)

In this challenge, we provide participants with a real-life event log, and we ask them to analyze these data using whatever techniques available, focusing on one or more of the process owner's questions or proving other unique insights into the process captured in the event log.

A jury will decide which report is best and the winning participant will receive a prize! Furthermore, selected submissions will be published in the proceedings of the BPI workshop.

We strongly encourage people to use any tools, techniques, methods at their disposal. There is no need to restrict to open-source tools, and proprietary tools as well as techniques developed or implemented specifically for this challenge are welcome.

The winner will be announced at the Workshop on September 8th 2014.

This year’s data is provided by the Rabobank Group ICT.

Similar to other ICT companies, Rabobank Group ICT has to implement an increasing number of software releases, while the time to market is decreasing.

Rabobank Group ICT has implemented the ITIL-processes and therefore uses the Change-process for implementing these so called planned changes.

Rabobank Group ICT is looking for fact-based insight into the impact of changes to the workload at the Service Desk and/or IT Operations.

The ultimate challenge is to design a (draft) predictive model, which can be used to implement in a BI environment. The purpose of this predictive model will be to support Business Change Management in implementing software releases with less impact on the Service Desk and/or IT Operations. However, we explicitly welcome any analysis even if the focus is not on the predictive nature of Rabobank's questions.

We have prepared several case-files with anonymous information from Rabobank Netherlands Group ICT for this challenge. The files contain record details from an ITIL Service Management tool called HP Service Manager. We provide you with extracts in CSV with the Interaction-, Incident- or Change-number as case ID. Next to these case-files, we provide you with an Activity-log, related to the Incident-cases. There is also a document detailing the data in the CSV file and providing background to the Service Management tool.

1. Identification of Impact-patterns: We expect there to be a correlation between the implementation of a change and the workload in the Service Desk (SD) and/or IT Operations (ITO), i.e. increased/decreased volume of Closed Interactions and/or increased/decreased volume of Closed Incidents. Rabobank Group ICT is interested in identifying any patterns that may be visible in the log for various service components to which a configuration item is related, in order to predict the workload at the SD and/or ITO after future changes.
2. Parameters for every Impact-pattern: In order to be able to use the results of prior changes to predict the workload for the Service Desk directly after the implementation of future changes, we are interested in the following parameters for every impact-pattern investigated in sub question 1:
   1. What is the average period to return to a steady state?
   2. What is the average increase/decrease of Closed Interactions once a new steady state is reached?
3. Change in Average Steps to Resolution: Since project managers are expected to deliver the same or better service levels after each change implementation, Rabobank Group ICT is looking for confirmation that this challenge is indeed being met for all or many Service Components.
4. Creativity challenge: Finally, we challenge the creative minds, to surprise Rabobank Group ICT with new insights on the provided data to help change implementation teams to continuously improve their Standard Operation Procedures.

The processes within Rabobank ICT revolve around the following service desk processes: Interaction Management, Incident Management, Change Management (see below).

For more details on the process, please have a look at the blog entry by Fluxicon, or Rabobank's quick reference quide.

The logs are provided in the CSV format. The dataset is stored in the 3TU datacenter as a collection of files. You can refer to the collection using the following DOI 10.4121/uuid:c3e5d162-0cfd-4bb0-bd82-af5268819c35. There are four data files:

• Change records For referencing purposes, the log file has a DOI 10.4121/uuid:d5ccb355-ca67-480f-8739-289b9b593aaf. Please use this DOI in any reference to the dataset.
• Incident records For referencing purposes, the log file has a DOI 10.4121/uuid:3cfa2260-f5c5-44be-afe1-b70d35288d6d. Please use this DOI in any reference to the dataset.
• Interaction records For referencing purposes, the log file has a DOI 10.4121/uuid:3d5ae0ce-198c-4b5c-b0f9-60d3035d07bf. Please use this DOI in any reference to the dataset.
• Incident activity records For referencing purposes, the log file has a DOI 10.4121/uuid:86977bac-f874-49cf-8337-80f26bf5d2ef. Please use this DOI in any reference to the dataset.

For reference purposes, the following document describes how the various columns in the data files are related: Quick reference guide

Fluxicon has prepared a Disco project with the data above. This can be accessed here:http://coda.fluxicon.com/assets/downloads/BPI-2014.dsc If you have any questions about Disco or need more explanations about the BPI challenge in Disco, please refer to http://fluxicon.com/blog/2014/04/bpi-challenge-2014/

On May 15th, a webinar regarding the challenge was held by Fluxicon. You can review the questions and answers of the webinar here.

For the first time this year, the challenge is split into two separate challenges. The first challenge is specifically targeting researchers and professionals in the area of business process intelligence, where the second challenge is targeting students (Bachelor, Master and PhD Students).

For the student competition, professional mentors are available. They will help students to submit a good report. Please contact Anne Rozinat anne@fluxicon.com for setting up contact with the mentors. The student teams can be matched with a mentor by 31 May.

For all participants, Fluxicon has prepared the datasets for use in their own toolset Disco. You can get access to this tool for the purpose of this challenge.

We received 13 submissions of which the jury found 11 of sufficient quality for publication. Below the submissions are listed in order of scoring by the jury.

For the main challenge:

1. Pierre Buhler, Rob O' Callaghan, Soline Aubry, Danielle Dejoy, Emily Kuo, Natalie Shoup, Inayat Khosla, Mark Ginsburg, Nicholas Hartman and Nicholas Mcbride. Service Desk and Incident Impact Patterns Following ITIL Change Implementation
2. Jan Suchy and Milan Suchy. Predictive Model for supporting ITIL Business Change Management Processes
3. Marcus Dees and Femke van den End. A Predictive Model for the Impact of Changes on the Workload of Rabobank Group ICT's Service Desk and IT Operations
4. Scott Buffett, Bruno Emond and Cyril Goutte. Using Sequence Classification to Label Behavior from Sequential Event Logs (Most recent version)
5. Peter Van den Spiegel, Leen Dieltjens, Liese Blevi, Jan Verdickt, Paul Albertini and Tim Provinciael. Applied data mining and process mining techniques for analyzing the impact of a change on the workload of the Service Desk and IT Operations.
6. John Hansen. BPIC Challenge 2014 - John Hansen
7. Tom Thaler, Sönke Knoch, Nico Krivograd, Peter Fettke and Peter Loos. ITIL Process and Impact Analysis at Rabobank ICT
8. Michael Arias, Mauricio Arriagada, Eric Rojas, Cecilia Saint-Pierre and Marcos Sepúlveda. Rabobank: Incident and change process analysis

For the student competition:

1. Gabriele Cacciola, Raffaele Conforti and Hoang Nguyen. Rabobank: A Process Mining Case Study BPI Challenge 2014 Report
2. Pedro Richetti, Bruna Brandão and Guilherme Lopes. BPIC 2014: Insights from the Analysis of Rabobank Service Desk Processes
3. Seung Won Hong, Ji Yun Hwang, Dan Bi Kim, Hyeoung Seok Choi, Seo Jin Choi and Suk Hyun Hong. Linking and Analyzing Rabobank Group ICT’s ITIL Subprocesses based on the Synergetic Capabilities of Process Mining and Data Mining

The first prize in the regular competition is a special award trophy for the winner, kindly offered by Fluxicon. For the student competition, the first prize is an iPad platinum, sponsored by TU/e. Finally, the Ngi-NGN sponsors a trip to Haifa for one representative of the best Dutch student group to attend the BPI workshop.

The challenge is co-organized by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining. The goal of this Task Force is to promote the research, development, education and understanding of process mining. For more information about the activities of the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining and its members see https://www.win.tue.nl/ieeetfpm/

to be determined