Homepage Wil van der Aalst

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Wil van der Aalst

If you are interested in process mining, process management, workflow automation, data science, business process intelligence, Petri nets, business process simulation, concurrency theory, BPM, machine learning or anything else related to processes and data, this website is the right place to look. Please check out my publications on these topics and use our software tools.

We specialize in process mining. Process mining bridges the gap between traditional model-based process analysis (e.g., simulation and other business process management techniques) and data-centric analysis techniques such as machine learning and data mining.

About Wil van der Aalst

Prof.dr.ir. Wil van der Aalst is a full professor at RWTH Aachen University, leading the Process and Data Science (PADS) group. He is also the Chief Scientist at Celonis, part-time affiliated with the Fraunhofer FIT, and a member of the Board of Governors of Tilburg University. He also has unpaid professorship positions at Queensland University of Technology (since 2003) and the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e). Currently, he is also a distinguished fellow of Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) in Trento, deputy CEO of the Internet of Production (IoP) Cluster of Excellence, and co-director of the RWTH Center for Artificial Intelligence.

His research interests include process mining, Petri nets, business process management, workflow management, process modeling, and process analysis. Wil van der Aalst has published over 275 journal papers, 35 books (as author or editor), 630 refereed conference/workshop publications, and 85 book chapters,.

Many of his papers are highly cited (he one of the most cited computer scientists in the world; according to Google Scholar, he has an H-index of 170 and has been cited over 130,000 times) and his ideas have influenced researchers, software developers, and standardization committees working on process support. Next to serving on the editorial boards of over ten scientific journals, he played an advisory role for several companies. He is often called the Godfather of Process Mining and the research he started in the late 1990-ties led to a wave of process mining tools, including commercial tools like Celonis, Disco, Apromore, UiPath Process Mining (ProcessGold), SAP Signavio Process Intelligence, ARIS Process Mining (Software AG), Abbyy Timeline, Appian Process Mining (LanaLabs), IBM Process Mining (myInvenio), Minit (Microsoft), Mehrwerk, QPR Process Mining, Skan, UltimateSuite, Mindzie, Nintex, PuzzleData ProDiscovery, Kofax, LiveJourney, iGrafx, Logpickr, Decisions Process Mining, Synesa, Everflow (Pega), Process Discovery Automation Anywhere (FortressIQ), BusinessOptix, Datricks, PAFnow (Celonis), DCR Process Mining, Oniq, Noreja, Mavim Process Mining, Process Science, Promease, Scout Process Discovery, Workfellow, Stereologic, UpFlux, Worksoft Process Mining, , etc. and open source tools like ProM, ProM Lite, RapidProM, OCPM, OCpi, Cortado, PM4knime, bupaR, etc. Van der Aalst received honorary degrees from the Moscow Higher School of Economics (Prof. h.c.), Tsinghua University, and Hasselt University (Dr. h.c.). He is also an IFIP Fellow, IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, and elected member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen), Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen), the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea), the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts (Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste), and the German Academy of Science and Engineering (Deutsche Akademie der Technikwissenschaften). In 2018 he was awarded an Alexander-von-Humboldt Professorship, Germany’s most valuable research award (five million euros).