Van der Aalst Energy Process Intelligence Lab Established at NCEPU.
During the same ceremony, North China Electric Power University (NCEPU) unveiled the Van der Aalst Energy Process Intelligence Lab, creating a new platform for collaboration between China and Europe in energy systems research and process intelligence. The lab will focus on applying process mining, object-centric process mining, and process intelligence to complex energy systems involving power plants, grids, storage systems, smart homes, electric vehicles, markets, industrial consumers, and renewable energy sources. By combining NCEPU’s leading role in energy systems with the world-leading expertise of PADS in process mining, the lab aims to support prediction, optimization, automation, and sustainable decision-making in the energy transition.
Some photos:
Unveiling of the Van der Aalst Energy Process Intelligence Lab and
Plaque of the Van der Aalst Energy Process Intelligence Lab.
On the NCEPU side this initiative is driven by prof. Long Cheng.
The new book by Arian Kiandoost, Mining Gold from Data: The Story of Wil van der Aalst and the Rise of Celonis, tells the remarkable story of how process mining grew from an academic idea into a global software category and one of Europe’s most visible technology success stories. I like how the story starts in my birth town Eersel.
The book then follows the development of process mining from the first ideas in the late 1990s, through the creation of algorithms and open-source tools such as ProM, to the emergence of a global research community. A central part of the story is the rise of Celonis, founded in Munich in 2011 by Alex, Basti, and Martin. Inspired by process mining, Celonis helped bring the technology from academia into practice and contributed to turning it into a multi-billion-euro global industry. The book is also available via Amazon, Apple, and other platforms. Here is the cover.
Keynote at Tsinghua University.
When visiting NCEPU in Beijing, I also delivered a keynote in the Tsinghua Big Data Intelligence Lecture Series, jointly organized by the School of Software, Tsinghua University, the National Engineering Research Center for Big Data System Software, and Tsinghua Dushi College. In my keynote, titled “Process Intelligence Before Artificial Intelligence: Why AI Needs OCPM” I explained why artificial intelligence needs object-centric process mining to understand real processes, interactions, and operational behavior. The lecture also highlighted the long-standing collaboration with Prof. Jianmin Wang and Prof. Lijie Wen at Tsinghua University, which began more than 20 years ago and continues through joint activities in workflow management, business process management, and process mining.
Mining a Scientist's Process: Essays Dedicated to Wil van der Aalst on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday. Springer published this Festschrift to celebrate my 60th birthday. Note the beautiful cover of the book showing my hobbies: climbing mountains, driving Porsches, mining processes, and questioning rules.
the book was edited by Jan Mendling, Sander Leemans, Boudewijn van Dongen, and Hajo Reijers.
I am deeply grateful to the more than 130 colleagues who contributed chapters to this Festschrift.
Reflecting on my 60th Birthday Symposium with gratitude. On 30–31 March 2026, colleagues, friends, and collaborators from the BPM and process mining communities gathered in Aachen for a symposium marking my 60th birthday.
It was a very special experience to see so many people who have shaped my scientific and professional journey come together in the historic Krönungssaal of Aachen City Hall. The program combined scientific talks, personal reflections, and informal exchanges, highlighting the development of process mining, BPM, and process intelligence over the past decades. Thanks for the wonderful speeches!
Some photos:
PhD group photo,
coffee break,
opening by Sander,
speech by the rector,
audience first day,
Adela,
Wim,
Marco,
Martin,
book presentation,
Alex and Martin, and
closing.
The new Gartner Magic Quadrant for Process Intelligence Platforms is out!
The name of the Gartner Magic Quadrant (MQ) changed from Process Mining to Process Intelligence.
The Process Intelligence market is booming—generating over 1.5 billion in revenue in 2025 with a massive 30 percent year-over-year increase! According to the new MQ, this technology has fully evolved from an exploratory niche into a mainstream enterprise necessity.
According to Gartner, Object-Centric Process Mining (OCPM) has reached a critical adoption phase.
For the fourth year in a row, Celonis has been the highest ranked in terms of completeness of vision and ability to execute.
In the FounderSense podcast I explain why many AI projects fail. Listen via Apple Podcasts or Spotify. If AI is applied without understanding the actual flow of work, it may automate the wrong activities, optimize local symptoms, or accelerate existing inefficiencies.
AI needs this operational context.
Without process intelligence, AI remains detached from reality.
With process intelligence, AI can become actionable, measurable, and aligned with business outcomes.
In 2009, I gave the keynote at the Gartner Business Process Management Summit in London. The title of my keynote was Process Mining: Beyond Business Intelligence and I explained what process mining was. The look and feel of my slides reveal that this is almost 20 years ago. However, many of the ideas and algorithms were already in place and are still valid today. The internet tends to forget about these things. The 2009 slides are a reminder that there is no such thing as a free lunch when it comes to process improvement. The technology and data are there. However, to improve, one needs changemakers who are willing to address inconvenient truths persistently.
Celebrating 25 years of process mining research! The term process mining was coined 25 years ago in the research proposal Process Design by Discovery by Wil van der Aalst and Ton Weijters. Process mining is described as the method of distilling a structured process description from a set of real executions. It also proposes things that today we would position as model repair: the actual executions of cases are used as input for revising the design. The proposal can be seen as small time capsule. The core idea was to stop separating process design from process execution: let processes emerge from how people actually work. The proposal proposes to learn process models from execution traces using inductive techniques. Today, we call this process discovery. The 1999 proposal also states that standard ML approaches cannot be used to learn process models. This is still the case after 25 years. The proposal also details the use of Behavioral Inheritance for Processes. See the paper Inheritance of behavior for the theoretical foundations. Inheritance of behavior is a topic that is still neglected, and, in the context of object-centric process mining, more important than ever.
Research.com just released the 2024 Edition of the Ranking of Best Scientists in the field of Computer Science.Happy to be ranked 9th in the World and second in Germany. RWTH Aachen University is again well-represented in the ranking of top computer scientists.
Here are the slides explaining the OCEL 2.0 Standard presented at ICPM 2023. Object-centric event logs (OCELs) form the basis for object-centric process mining (OCPM). OCEL 2.0 forms the new, more expressive standard allowing for more extensive process analyses while remaining in an easily exchangeable format. Visit www.ocel-standard.org two download the standard and example data sets.
The RWTH AI Week 2023 was again a great success. The biannual AI Week brings together researchers, industry and the general public in and around Aachen to show case the cutting-edge research on AI at RWTH, to connect key players from academia and industry, to discuss AI-related topics with the citizens, and to educate the next generation on AI.
How to evaluate scientific research? is a controversial topic always triggering discussions. I wrote the blog post Yet Another View on Citation Scores both as a pdf and html version.
I have updated my website during the Christmas break. Here you can find my publications for 2022. Enjoy reading!
The 5th International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM 2023) will take place in Rome. The event will take place from October 23 to October 27, 2023, and is organized by the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Computer, Control and Management Engineering of Sapienza University of Rome.
Several awards for PADS members at ICPM 2022 in Bolzano. At the leading process mining conference, members from the PADS group won the Best student paper award of the ICPM (Bianka Bakullari and Wil van der Aalst), Best paper award of the RPM workshop (Majid Rafiei, Frederik Wangelik, and Wil van der Aalst), and the Best paper award of the PQMI workshop (Gyunam Park and Wil van der Aalst).
The PADS Excellence Initiative Started. Challenging problems require a close exchange of young talent, scientists, and experienced industry leaders. Therefore, we initiated PADS Excellence to connect excellent students, researchers, and professionals.
Join the new course Process Mining: From Theory to Execution that helps to bridge the gap between basic process mining concepts and state-of-the-art software widely used in industry. The course is the result of the collaboration between RWTH and Celonis.
The 44th annual international Petri Nets conference will be organised by the reserach group on Reconfigurable and Embedded Systems at NOVA School of Science and Technology and will be held at Lisbon on one of the campi of NOVA University Lisbon.
The first Summer School on Process Mining organized by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining will take place in Aachen from July 4th until July 8th, 2022. Be sure to mark these dates in your calendar!
Happy to receive the BPM 2021 Test-of-Time-Award and Runner Up Award! At BPM 2021, Rome, Italy, we received the Test-of-Time-Award for our paper Repairing Process Models to Reflect Reality (with Dirk Fahland).
We also won the Runner-Up Award (joint work with Fabrizio Maria Maggi, Marco Montali, Michael Westergaard): Monitoring Business Constraints with Linear Temporal Logic: An Approach Based on Colored Automata.
The 19th edition of the BPM conference series (BPM 2021) will be hosted by Dipartimento di Ingegneria Informatica, Automatica e Gestionale Antonio Ruberti at Sapienza Universita di Roma, Rome, Italy, from 6 to 10 September, 2021.
Professor Wil van der Aalst Elected IFIP Fellow IFIP Fellow. The most prestigious IFIP's technical distinction is the title of IFIP Fellow, which is conferred by the IFIP General Assembly in recognition of outstanding contributions in the field of information processing. Professor Wil van der Aalst belongs to the first group of 18 IFIP Fellows.
