Business process management, service-oriented architectures and their reverse engineering heavily rely on the fundamental endeavor of mining business process models and Web service business protocols from log files. Model extraction and mining aim at the (re)discovery of the behavior of a running model implementation using solely its interaction and activity traces, and no a priori information on the target model. Our preliminary study shows that : (i) a minority of interaction data is recorded by process and service-aware architectures, (ii) a limited number of methods achieve model extraction without knowledge of either positive process and protocol instances or the information to infer them, and (iii) the existing approaches rely on restrictive assumptions that only a fraction of real-world Web services satisfy. Enabling the extraction of these interaction models from activity logs based on realistic hypothesis necessitates: (i) approaches that make abstraction of the business context in order to allow their extended and generic usage, and (ii) tools for assessing the mining result through implementation of the process and service life-cycle. Moreover, since interaction logs are often incomplete, uncertain and contain errors, then mining approaches proposed in this work need to be capable of handling these imperfections properly. We propose a set of mathematical models that encompass the different aspects of process and protocol mining. The extraction approaches that we present, issued from linear algebra, allow us to extract the business protocol while merging the classic process mining stages. On the other hand, our protocol representation based on time series of flow density variations makes it possible to recover the temporal order of execution of events and messages in the process. In addition, we propose the concept of proper timeouts to refer to timed transitions, and provide a method for extracting them despite their property of being invisible in logs. In the end, we present a multitask framework aimed at supporting all the steps of the process workflow and business protocol life-cycle from design to optimization.The approaches presented in this manuscript have been implemented in prototype tools, and experimentally validated on scalable datasets and real-world process and web service models.The discovered business protocols, can thus be used to perform a multitude of tasks in an organization or enterprise.
