This contest is a ancillary activity of the 1st International Conference on Process Mining, that will take place in June 24-26, 2019, Aachen, Germany, we are happy to announce the third edition of the Process Discovery Contest.

Process Discovery is the branch of Process Mining that focus on extracting process models – mainly business process models – from an event log.

The Process Discovery Contest (PDC) is dedicated to advance the development of new discovery techniques and the performance of existing techniques. It also tries to stimulate the community to consider new types of event data which remain not sufficiently explored. This is the third edition of the contest that follows the success obtained during the editions of 2016 and 2017. Since this edition, the contest has become part of the International Conference on Process Mining.

The PDC’s objective is to compare the efficiency of techniques to discover process models that provide:

• a proper balance between “overfitting” and “underfitting”. A process model is overfitting (the event log) if it is too restrictive, disallowing behavior which is part of the underlying process. This typically occurs when the model only allows for the behavior recorded in the event log. Conversely, it is underfitting (the reality) if it is not restrictive enough, allowing behavior which is not part of the underlying process. This typically occurs if it overgeneralizes the example behavior in the event log.
• business value for process owners. The model needs to certainly be fitting and precise but also must provide insights into how processes are executed.

The contest is open to any discovery algorithms, combination of different algorithms and more elaborated procedures, which can possibly involve some human support (similarly to semi-supervised techniques). The contest is independent of the notation in which the discovered models are expressed: No preference is made. Any procedural (e.g., Petri Net or BPMN) or declarative (e.g., Declare) notation are equally welcome.

Neither is the context restricted to open-source tools. Proprietary tools can also participate.

For more details on the organization, details on the submission, documents and training data, please refer to the PDC webpage

• 13 January 2019: Opening to submissions. The training event logs are made available.
• 15 April 2019: Deadline for submissions.
• 16 April 2019: Publications of the “test” event logs and Notification of requests to provide classification.
• 30 April 2019: Submissions of the classifications for “test” event logs.
• 1-15 May 2019: Assessment of the jury members of the top-notch submissions .
• 15 May 2019: Notification of the winner.
• 23-28 June 2019: Announcement of the winner and awards.

The results and the winner are announced in Aachen during the International Conference on Process Mining. The winner group is given a chance to present the approach/technique during the conference and will be awarded with a plaque. A Monetary support will be provided to facilitate the participation to the conference and to present the results.

Each top-notch submission (including the winner) will be invited to submit an article for International Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer (STTT), published by Springer. This applies to all top-notch submissions that refer to sufficiently novel techniques that have not been already accepted elsewhere or being under review. The organizer will determine whether or not one submission falls into this category.

• Josep Carmona, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), Spain
• Massimiliano de Leoni, University of Padua, Italy
• Benoît Depaire, Hasselt University, Belgium.

Any questions related to the contest can be directed to the organizers via process.discovery.contest@gmail.com.