ReThink Your Processes! A Review of Process Mining for Sustainability

The transition towards more sustainable practices requires companies to assess their impact on the social and ecological environment and establish new processes in complex inter-organisational systems. Process mining is a collection of data-driven techniques to visualise, analyse and improve business processes. Its potential to increase sustainable business processes has been acknowledged by academia and industry but not systematically reviewed. This work analyses process mining's application for sustainability by conducting two consecutive literature studies - the first on the broad domain of sustainability, and the second on the circular economy, a widely accepted approach for pursuing sustainability. Results show the potential of process mining for assessing and analysing sustainability in business processes, allowing for data-driven decision support and targeted improvement. They also show that process mining has yet to reach the sustainability domain. To enable collaboration between both communities, we present PM4S, a framework for applying process mining for sustainability.