NICE: the Native IoT-Centric Event Log Model for Process Mining

More and more so-called IoT-enhanced business processes (BPs) are supported by IoT devices, which collect large amounts of data about the execution of such processes. While these data have the potential to reveal crucial insights into the execution of the BPs, the absence of a suitable event log format integrating IoT data to process data greatly hampers the realisation of this potential. In this paper, we present the Native Iot-Centric Event (NICE) log, a new event log format designed to incorporate IoT data into a process event log ensuring traceability, flexibility and limiting data loss. The new format was linked to a smart spaces data simulator to generate synthetic logs. We evaluate our format against requirements previously established for an IoT-enhanced event log format, showing that it meets all requirements, contrarily to other alternative formats. We then perform an analysis of a synthetic log to show how IoT data can easily be used to explain anomalies in the process.