The course covers the main concepts spanning over the topics of business process automation and process mining. The treated arguments pertain: the characteristics and functionalities of Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs); the implementation, deployment and execution of business process models on BPMSs; the formal notions and fundamental properties of the executable semantics of models grounded in Petri nets; the fundamental algorithms of process mining, with a particular focus on the automated discovery of processes out of event logs.

Since this is a courses with continuous assessment (PI), attendance is mandatory according to the standard regulations that can be read in dedicated page on the university website. Notice in particular that the written exam will take place during the last class. Therefore, absence is allowed for at most two lectures.

The course is designed as a mixture of lecture with accompanying project assignments.

Both theoretical contents and hands-on sessions will be held. Tools used in the course will include the Bonita Business Process Management System (https://www.bonitasoft.com), the WoPeD workflow and Petri net modeller and analyser (http://woped.dhbw-karlsruhe.de/woped/), the ProM process mining toolkit (http://www.promtools.org), and Celonis process mining platform (https://www.celonis.com/).

A Virtual Machine based on the VirtualBox platform (https://www.virtualbox.org/) will be distributed with all the necessary software pre-installed.

The final grade is assigned on the basis of the following proportions:
60% - written exam
20% - group assignment on process implementation
20% - group assignment on process mining

Participants are expected to be familiar with the content of the course Business Process Management. Generally, it is assumed that the concepts described in Dumas et al.: Fundamentals of Business Process Management, Springer 2013, are understood.

It is required that the “Process Innovation” course has been already regularly attended, and that the following notions are already acquired:

• Business Process Management (BPM), its initiative, goals, and life-cycle;
• business process identification, discovery, analysis, and re-design;
• business process modelling with BPMN.

Basic notions of set theory are recommended.