This post has been authored by Nina Graves.
Current approaches to organizational sustainability analysis face significant methodological challenges. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and similar frameworks require time-consuming manual data collection, rely on static models, and struggle to connect environmental impacts to their process-level causes. This often results in sustainability analysis becoming a reporting exercise rather than an integrated management approach.
Object-Centric Process Mining (OCPM) represents a methodological advancement that may address these limitations. The approach leverages Object-Centric Event Logs (OCEL), which capture relationships between events and multiple objects in business processes. The OCEL data structure contains timestamps, activities, objects, and their attributes—allowing for multi-dimensional analysis.
When enhanced with sustainability metrics, these logs provide a structural foundation for more granular environmental impact assessment. The methodology integrates inventory data, impact factors, and allocation mechanisms directly with process execution data.
Recent Work
In our recent explorative paper, we used an exemplary OCEL to explore and discuss the usage of OCPM for sustainability assessment. We showcased an approach in which a sustainability-enriched OCEL is used for 1) impact detection, 2) impact allocation, to enable 3) system analysis.
We demonstrated the analytical capabilities to track environmental impacts across the process, supporting the
- determination of sustainability-related data from an OCEL,
- storage of sustainability data using an OCEL,
- automated modelling of complex process landscapes,
- flexible impact allocation, and
- potential automation for impact detection using impact databases.
Furthermore, we showed that the OCEL can support more accurate and flexible impact assessment and analysis by combining the same sustainability data used for traditional sustainability assessment with event data.
Figure 1- Example for more differentiated and accurate impact considerations.
The distinguishing differences lie in:
- Multi-level analysis: Environmental impacts are calculated for individual instances (events and objects) which can be aggregated and differentiated, e.g., to activities or object types or by specific attributes.
- Multi-perspective analysis: The environmental impact can be considered with regard to different organizational elements, such as products, resources, total systems, individual (sub-)processes,…
- Combining difference reference units: The OCEL allows for the association of relevant primary data to events, (sets of) objects, and event-object combinations. This requires less allocation efforts in the pre-processing of the data enabling a stronger decoupling of impact assessment and impact allocation. This decoupling allows for the previously mentioned increased flexibility.
Naturally, the integration of sustainability data also allows for the application of OCPM techniques for causal investigations and may potentially even support impact management and compliance checking.
PoC Web Application: OCEAn – Object-Centric Environmental Analysis
As a proof of concept, we provide OCEAn—a software tool that links company data with sustainability information. It enables the definition of environmental impact rules, supports semi-automatic data processing, and provides various visualizations of results.
OCEAn supports:
- Integration of environmental data with process event logs
- Definition of impact rules at activity and attribute levels
- Multiple allocation algorithms based on object relationships
- Different visualization of environmental impacts
Discussion
The research presents both methodological advantages and challenges.
Advantages:
- Leverages existing digital process traces
- Aligns process management with sustainability objectives
- Supports more accurate impact allocation through object relationships
- Enables root cause analysis of environmental hotspots
- Provides a data-driven foundation for ongoing assessment
Limitations:
- Limited by data availability and quality
- Requires identifiable process elements
- Depends on comprehensive domain expertise
- Allocation methodologies require further development
- Extracting OCELs and enhancement with sustainability data
This exploratory work establishes a foundation for further investigation into data-driven sustainability assessment. Future research directions include developing standardized frameworks for sustainability-enhanced OCELs, more sophisticated allocation methodologies, and improved visualization techniques for complex impact relationships.
The work contributes to bridging conceptual gaps between process science and sustainability science, potentially enabling more dynamic and comprehensive environmental performance assessment in organizational contexts.
References:
Find the Paper on Research Gate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/391736048_Object-Centric_Process_Mining_for_Semi-Automated_and_Multi-Perspective_Sustainability_Analyses
Repository: https://github.com/rwth-pads/ocel4lca