The function read_xes can be used to read XES-files and turn the data into an event log object in R. The function needs only one argument, called xesfile. This can be a local path to a file with a .xes extension or an URL. An example XES-file can be found at the following link: https://bupar.net/eventdata/exercise1.xes. When opening this file in a browser, you will see that it is an XML-file. More information on the notation can be found here.
Importing a XES-file is easily done as follows:
data <- read_xes("https://bupar.net/eventdata/exercise1.xes")## Warning in read_xes("https://bupar.net/eventdata/exercise1.xes"): No activity
## instance identifier specified in xes-file. By default considered each event as a
## different activity instance. Please check!data## Log of 11 events consisting of:
## 3 traces
## 3 cases
## 11 instances of 5 activities
## 1 resource
## Events occurred from 2008-12-09 07:20:01 until 2008-12-09 07:23:01
##
## Variables were mapped as follows:
## Case identifier: CASE_concept_name
## Activity identifier: activity_id
## Resource identifier: resource_id
## Activity instance identifier: activity_instance_id
## Timestamp: timestamp
## Lifecycle transition: lifecycle_id
##
## # A tibble: 11 x 7
## CASE_concept_na~ activity_id lifecycle_id resource_id timestamp
## <chr> <fct> <fct> <fct> <dttm>
## 1 Case3.0 A complete UNDEFINED 2008-12-09 07:20:01
## 2 Case3.0 E complete UNDEFINED 2008-12-09 07:21:01
## 3 Case3.0 D complete UNDEFINED 2008-12-09 07:22:01
## 4 Case2.0 A complete UNDEFINED 2008-12-09 07:20:01
## 5 Case2.0 C complete UNDEFINED 2008-12-09 07:21:01
## 6 Case2.0 B complete UNDEFINED 2008-12-09 07:22:01
## 7 Case2.0 D complete UNDEFINED 2008-12-09 07:23:01
## 8 Case1.0 A complete UNDEFINED 2008-12-09 07:20:01
## 9 Case1.0 B complete UNDEFINED 2008-12-09 07:21:01
## 10 Case1.0 C complete UNDEFINED 2008-12-09 07:22:01
## 11 Case1.0 D complete UNDEFINED 2008-12-09 07:23:01
## # ... with 2 more variables: activity_instance_id <chr>, .order <int>Note that in the example above, the read_xes functions emits a warnings that no activity instance identifier was found. Recall that an event log objects in R needs certain data fields to be present. However, it might be so that not all of these field are available, in which case read_xes will throw a warning or an error. Ideally, the XES-file should contain at least the following elements:
<trace>
<string key="concept:name" value="Case3.0"/>
<event>
<string key="concept:name" value="A"/>
<int key="concept:instance" value = "1"/>
<string key="org:resource" value="UNDEFINED"/>
<date key="time:timestamp" value="2008-12-09T08:20:01.527+01:00"/>
<string key="lifecycle:transition" value="complete"/>
...
</event>
...
</trace>These elements are translated as follows to the terminolgy used by bupaR.
| XES | bupaR | |
|---|---|---|
| trace | concept:name | case_id |
| event | concept:name | activity_id |
| concept:instance | activity_instance_id | |
| org:resource | resource_id | |
| time:timestamp | timestamp | |
| lifecycle:transition | lifecycle_id |
When there is no case identifier, an artificial case identifier with the name CASE_ID will be created based on the hierarchy of the XES-file. In case of other missing elements, either an error will be thrown, or a warning.
An error will be thrown if the XES-files does not contains an activity identifier or a timestamp. As such these are the minimum requirements to create an event log object from a XES-file.
In case the lifecycle transition identifier or the resource identifier is missing, an empty placeholder variable will be created and a warning will be emitted.
In case the activity instance identifier is missing, a default activity instance identifier column will be added. This column will regard every event in the log as a distinct activity instance. A warning will be emitted noting that you should check whether this is a justified assumption.
If available, missing information can be added manually to the event log object in R by overwritting the variables, e.g. with mutate.
Note that both traces and events can have additional elements in the XES-files. These will be added as extra variables in the resulting event log. Attributes at a the level of traces will get the prefix CASE_ in their name. 1
In certain circumstances, it might be useful to have a separate list of cases with case attributes. This can be obtained using function read_xes_cases. The argument for this function is the same, i.e. a xesfile. The result is a data.frame with one row for each case and one column for each attribute. Non-existing attributes for a specific case are filled in with NA. Below, this function is illustrated using the repairExample event log, which has one case attribute called description. For the sake of illustration, the entire event log is also imported.
read_xes_cases("https://bupar.net/eventdata/repairExample.xes")## # A tibble: 1,104 x 2
## CASE_concept_name CASE_description
## <chr> <chr>
## 1 1 Simulated process instance
## 2 10 Simulated process instance
## 3 100 Simulated process instance
## 4 1000 Simulated process instance
## 5 1001 Simulated process instance
## 6 1002 Simulated process instance
## 7 1003 Simulated process instance
## 8 1004 Simulated process instance
## 9 1005 Simulated process instance
## 10 1006 Simulated process instance
## # ... with 1,094 more rowsread_xes("https://bupar.net/eventdata/repairExample.xes")## Warning in read_xes("https://bupar.net/eventdata/repairExample.xes"): No
## activity instance identifier specified in xes-file. By default considered each
## event as a different activity instance. Please check!## Log of 11855 events consisting of:
## 77 traces
## 1104 cases
## 11855 instances of 8 activities
## 13 resources
## Events occurred from 1970-01-01 05:36:00 until 1970-01-24 08:16:00
##
## Variables were mapped as follows:
## Case identifier: CASE_concept_name
## Activity identifier: activity_id
## Resource identifier: resource_id
## Activity instance identifier: activity_instance_id
## Timestamp: timestamp
## Lifecycle transition: lifecycle_id
##
## # A tibble: 11,855 x 12
## CASE_concept_na~ CASE_description activity_id defectFixed defectType
## <chr> <chr> <fct> <chr> <chr>
## 1 1 Simulated proce~ Register <NA> <NA>
## 2 1 Simulated proce~ Analyze De~ <NA> <NA>
## 3 1 Simulated proce~ Analyze De~ <NA> 6
## 4 1 Simulated proce~ Repair (Co~ <NA> <NA>
## 5 1 Simulated proce~ Repair (Co~ <NA> <NA>
## 6 1 Simulated proce~ Test Repair <NA> <NA>
## 7 1 Simulated proce~ Test Repair true <NA>
## 8 1 Simulated proce~ Inform User <NA> <NA>
## 9 1 Simulated proce~ Archive Re~ true <NA>
## 10 10 Simulated proce~ Register <NA> <NA>
## # ... with 11,845 more rows, and 7 more variables: lifecycle_id <fct>,
## # numberRepairs <chr>, resource_id <fct>, phoneType <chr>, timestamp <dttm>,
## # activity_instance_id <chr>, .order <int>Writing of XES-files can be done using the function write_xes.
args(write_xes)## function (eventlog, xesfile = file.choose(), case_attributes = NULL)
## NULLIt minimally requires 2 arguments:
Additionally, one can specify which of the variables in the event log should be regarded as case attributes by supplying a character vector of variable names to the case_attributes argument. If this argument is not specified, all the variables start with prefix CASE_ will be considered as case attributes.
eventdataR::patients
write_xes(patients, "patients.xes")On terminology: what in XES is called a trace (i.e. between