Research
The seven most recent publications by members of the group:- Research Methods in Business Process Management. Jana Rehse, Jan Martijn van der Werf, Sander J.J. Leemans. Springer Nature in press.
- Recursive Object-Centric Process Discovery with Fitness and Rediscovery Guarantees. Jan Niklas van Detten, Pol Schumacher, Sander J.J. Leemans. Information Systems in press.
- A Matter of Perspective: Case Notion Selection for Object-Centric Performance Analysis. Jan Niklas van Detten, Pol Schumacher, Sander J. J. Leemans. International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems in press.
- Miss Probabilities for Subprocesses. Philipp Bär, Adam T. Burke, Moe T. Wynn, Sander J.J. Leemans. International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems in press.
- Do my Log and Model Originate From the Same Process? Log-Model Hypothesis Testing. Felix Britzelmaier, Cameron Pitsch, Sander J. J. Leemans. International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems in press.
- Stochastic Process Mining: Characteristics and Challenges. Sander J.J. Leemans, Xixi Lu, David Chapela, Claudio Di Ciccio, Izack Cohen, Benoit Depaire, Stephan Fahrenkrog-Petersen, Avigdor Gal, Massimiliano de Leoni, Henrik Leopold, Orlenys López Pintado, Felix Mannhardt, Fabrizio Maria Maggi, Niels Martin, Marco Montali, Marco Pegoraro, Artem Polyvyanyy, Arik Senderovich, Sam Verboven, Akio Watanabe, Matthias Weidlich, Jan-Martijn E.M. van der Werf. IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering in press.
- Noise-Resistant Discovery of Identifier-Sound Object-Centric Process Models. Jan Niklas van Detten, Pol Schumacher, Sander J. J. Leemans. Process Science in press.
Software
The BPM group maintains several pieces of software, packages and tools.- Ebi is a stochastic process mining software suite. For more information, see https://ebitools.org.
- Tikz-bpmn is a Latex Tikz library to draw BPMN models. For more information, see https://ctan.org/pkg/tikz-bpmn.
- Visual Miner is a process mining tool that combines several process mining techniques in a single graphical package. For more information, see http://visualminer.org.
Teaching
Depth-Area Oral Colloquium (Schwerpunktkolloquium)
It is possible to do a depth-area oral colloquium in the BPM group. To this end, you should have at least followed the Fundamentals of Business Process Management course, plus ideally a seminar. To reach the required three courses, you'll need another course from another group, with a second examiner from that respective group.Please note that the PADS chair does not accept depth-area oral colloquia unless all three courses are from their chair. Still, the BPM group can assess Business Process Intelligence and Advanced Process Mining, however we'll need another examiner.
The group
| Office | E2356-6009 to 6011 Ahornstraße 55 52074 Aachen, Germany |
Prof. Sander Leemans
Group lead.
Born in Boxtel, the Netherlands, Univ-Prof. Dr. Ir. Sander J.J. Leemans is a professor (W2) at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule University (RWTH), Aachen, Germany.
His research interests include process mining, process discovery, conformance checking, stochastic process mining, and robotic process automation. In particular, he specialises in making solid academic techniques available to end-users, analysts and industry partners. He teaches business process management, business process modelling and business process improvement.
| Personal website | https://leemans.ch |
| Additional engagements | Fraunhofer Gesellschaft |
Tian Li
Scientific employee.
Tian Li is a joint PhD student at RWTH Aachen University and the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on stochastic process mining. At RWTH, he is actively engaged in courses Fundamentals of Business Process Management, Business Process Modelling & Computation, Reliability in Process Mining, and Advanced Topics in Stochastic Process Mining.
| Additional engagements: | University of Melbourne |
Niklas van Detten
Scientific employee.
Niklas is a PhD student at RWTH, and a working student at Celonis. His research focuses on modeling formalisms and process discovery algorithms in the object-centric setting. He is engaged in our courses Fundamentals of Business Process Management, Business Process Modelling & Computation and the BPM Software Lab.
| Additional engagements: | Celonis |
Student projects
Open student projects
-
Bachelor project:
Faster Event Log Comparison.
Applications close 1 November 2026. - Bachelor or Master project: BYO. Got an idea that lies in the field of the BPM group? Feel free to let us know; if it's interesting, we might consider it.
Previous and ongoing projects
-
2026
- GPU Programming for Process Mining. J.M. (bachelor).
- Process Tree Alignments in Rust. F.R. In collaboration with i9 - Process and Data Science (bachelor).
- Stochastic Recall and Precision. Y.Z. (bachelor).
- Process Discovery in Rust. R.D. (bachelor).
- Stochastic Process Discovery: Toothpaste Miner. L.G. (bachelor).
- Clustering of Object-Centric Cases. P.S. (bachelor).
- Knime + Ebi. R.Y. In collaboration with Fraunhofer (bachelor).
- Stochastic Process Discovery using Sampling and Optimization. A.K.L.M.C. (bachelor).
- Stochastic Process Discovery with Directly Follows Graphs. L.H. (bachelor).
- Analysing web-tracking data. M.B. (bachelor).
- Fast Conformance Checking of Process Trees. F.R. In collaboration with i9 - Process and Data Science (bachelor).
- PM2 for a BPI Challenge. N.L. (bachelor).
- Implementation of a Cohort Analysis Tool and Application on Industrial Process Data. A.K. In collaboration with Bosch (bachelor).
- Simplicity of Business Processes. E.M. (bachelor).
- Discovering POWL models. K.E. In collaboration with Fraunhofer (bachelor).
- Visual Object-Centric Process Discovery. S.S. (master).
- One Case Notion to Rule Them All. F.S. (master).
- Permutation tests for stochastic languages. F.B. (master).
- Duplicated Activities in Process Discovery. J.S. (master).
- Comparing Event Logs. F.G. In collaboration with Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (master).
- Process Mining on Conflict Data. I.C. (master).
- Timed Process Models. Y.L. (master).
- Heuristics for Conformance Checking. B.B. In collaboration with i9 - Process and Data Science (master).
- LLM for Object-Centric Process Mining. A.L. (master).
- Process Model Repair using Atoms. E.A. In collaboration with SAP Signavio (master).
- Comparing Event Logs. S.B. In collaboration with Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (master).
-
2025
- Conformance Checking (EMSC) in Rust. L.M. In collaboration with i9 - Process and Data Science (bachelor).
- Visualizations for Object-Centric Process Trees . P.A.D.P. (bachelor).
- Stochastic BPMN Discovery. L.O. (bachelor).
- Object-Centric Discovery through Case Notions. P.F. (bachelor).
- Discovery of Stochastic BPMN Models. J.D. (bachelor).
- Extending advanced case notion measures in Rust. R.S. (bachelor).
- Object-Centric Conformance Checking in Rust. M.B. (bachelor).
- Studying online browsing behaviour using process mining. K.S. In collaboration with Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften (master).
- Generalised stochastic labelled Petri nets. D.P. In collaboration with i9 - Process and Data Science (master).
- Stochastic Conformance Checking with BPMN. A.K. (master).
- Stochastic BPMN discovery. S.V. (master).
- Process Mining: Analysing Resources. G.S. (master).
- Developing Heuristc Fallthroughs for the Inductive Miner. C.S. (master).
- Object-Centric Process Mining using Graphs. E.W. (master).
- Beyond Incomplete Process Insights - Contributions to Conformance Checking and Stochastic Process Analysis. P.B. In collaboration with Queensland University of Technology (master).
- Process Differences in Power Plants. S.W. In collaboration with Uniper (master).
- Sampling in Process Mining. M.M. (master).
- Stochastic Conformance Checking with Partial Trace Matching. P.M. (master).
- Process Mining with Exogenous Data. A.B. In collaboration with Queensland University of Technology (phd).
- Data Quality Improvement in Integrated Patient Care. J.D. In collaboration with Fraunhofer (phd).
-
2024
- Approximate Inductive Miner Filtering. M.D. (bachelor).
- Haskell & Process Mining. P.F. (bachelor).
- Stochastic Process Discovery in Python. M.A.K. (bachelor).
- Optimizing Cohort Analysis: Exploring Heuristics for Refined Splits on Numeric Attributes. L.J.C. (bachelor).
- Batching in Process Mining. B.B. In collaboration with Celonis (master).
- Querying Infinite Process Models. E.P. (master).
- Guaranteeing Privacy through Differential Privacy for Healthcare Process Data. H.U. In collaboration with Queensland University of Technology (master).
- Enhancing Operational Efficiency through Process Mining and Robotic Process Automation: A Comprehensive Study of Customer Journey and Meter to Cash Processes. D.I. In collaboration with Stadtwerke Münster (master).
- Identify process differences in Power Plants with the help of Process Mining. L.B. In collaboration with Uniper (master).
- A Conceptualisation of Process Mining Impacts. A.M. In collaboration with Queensland University of Technology (phd).
- Stochastic Process Mining. A.B. In collaboration with Queensland University of Technology (phd).
-
2023
- Investigating the Impact of Training Workers on Data Quality. H.F. In collaboration with RWTH Mechanical Engineering (bachelor).
- Analysis of the Influence of different Reward and Observation Designs in the Context of Reinforcement Learning for Production Scenarios of Modular Car Body Manufacturing. T.N.L. In collaboration with Mercedes-Benz Research (bachelor).
- Visualizing and Discovering Causal Relations to End Users for Optimization of Process Analysis. P.F. (master).
- Comparative Process Mining in Healthcare. T.M. In collaboration with Queensland University of Technology (master).
- An Approximate Inductive Miner. J.N.V.D. In collaboration with Celonis (master).
- Comparative Process Mining in Healthcare. A.T. In collaboration with Queensland University of Technology (master).
- Visualisation of Causal Reasoning over Control-Flow Decisions in Process Models. A.P. (master).
- Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Stochastic Process Discovery. T.L. In collaboration with University of Melbourne (phd).
- Object-Centric Process Mining. J.N.V.D. In collaboration with Celonis (phd).