Installing ProM lite

Hi, and welcome back. In this lecture, I will show you how to install ProM Lite, but first, I’ll explain to you why we picked ProM Lite for use in this course. So there are several process mining tools available, and here you see nine most prominent commercial tools. These tools have certain things in common and can be viewed as a Swiss army knife with a few tools. And these commercial tools are actually well-tested, user friendly, and can handle large data files. So they have only a few tools, few features, but what they do, they do well. However, they have limited functionality, so they only support a couple of analysis features, and advanced features are often missing.

Here at Eindhoven University of Technology, we have been developing the process mining workbench, ProM, for over 15 years.

We use ProM mainly as an academic tool, and therefore, it has many, many features. So last time we counted, we had over 1,000 plugins, and each plugin provides a single feature. We had over 1,000 plugins in this framework. And although we are currently actively developing this, the quality of the plugins varies. So some plugins are very frequently used and well tested. Others are developed for particular research for a particular publication, and sometimes even for a particular data set. And also, some users might find the user interface a bit less friendly than the average commercial tool.

Therefore, recently, we decided to create a variant, ProM Lite, which is still the same ProM, the same framework, but with less tools, with less plugins included. So we selected a bit over 100 plugins to be included, and each of these plugins has been better tested. So even though we don’t promise commercial quality yet, each plugin is of better quality than before, and we only selected those that are of good quality and perform well. However, the user interface is still the same. In this lecture and throughout this whole course, we will use ProM Lite. So remember, don’t use ProM, use ProM Lite. And in this lecture, I’ll show you how to install this. So ProM can be downloaded from promtools.org.

And on the left, you see several download links. So for Windows, you have ProM Lite, which we are using– including a 64-bit Java Runtime, 32-bits or without Java Runtime, and the same for Mac. You have a ProM Lite bundle. And also, for other platforms, you can download ProM Lite. So if you’re using Linux, you can also use ProM Lite. It’s important, however, to note that we’re not downloading ProM 6.5.1. We’re downloading ProM Lite. When you visit the page, it could be that it just mentions ProM Lite 1.1 or 1.2, for instance. And always take the newest ProM Lite version, of course.

And it’s always recommended to do this, including the Java Runtime Environment, there you get the best guarantees that it runs out of the box. So I’ll click this link, and I’ll save the file, and it’s downloading the installer, which is 70 megabytes.

That gives me time to, in the meantime, explain you what you see on promtools.org for the rest. So below the download links, there are also documents. So there are example log files, and there’s also a getting started and tutorial guides that help you to get familiar with the ProM user interface, and also to learn how to apply certain techniques. However, we, of course, also cover this in this course, but if you need a bit more information, you can look here. There are also ProM newsletters that give you a bit of an update of what’s going on, and there are also other links to other websites related to ProM and process mining.

So in the meantime, the download has finished, so we can start the installer.

And it’s preferred to download this in your User folder because ProM would like to change some files with the best settings, so put it into the User folder or in the temp directory or a particular directory for ProM. You can install it in the Program Files, but then you will always get a message says cannot change a particular file. So I will install it in my User folder, and it will just install, no further options. And it’s now extracting the Java Runtime Environment and the ProM executable that we need to run it.

And now, it’s only installing the core components. So it’s actually only installing the ProM framework. So now when we run ProM for the first time in a couple of seconds, now we see here, ProM Lite has been installed. And when you start it, you get this Flash screen, giving you the revision numbers and the people that contributed to ProM. And at the first boot, it will need to install the packages. So this is the screen that you will get, and it will now download and install all the packages that are required. So as I said before, ProM is a framework, and all the features are provided by plugins. These can be updated regularly.

So it could be that when you start ProM Lite after a couple of days, there is a message saying there are new versions of plugins ready. Do you want to download them? It’s always recommended to do so because ProM Lite is heavily tested and always contains the latest bug fixes. And since it’s downloading all these packages– so over 100– this can take a while, but please just let it finish and download everything that’s required.

So we will fast forward this bit until the download is finished.

So now it notifies me by lighting up the green OK button that the downloading is complete, and it’s always recommended to check this box, automatically install new updates. And then the next phase is the first start of ProM, and what it does in the background is it scans all the downloaded plugin files, and it tries to find all the plugins that are in there. So it’s scanning all the files. And this, again, can take a while, but it’s only happening the first time.

And once it’s done, you see the first– an empty view of ProM, which we will explain in the next lectures. So now you have installed ProM. You can start process mining. So now I hope you all have installed ProM Lite, which prepares you for the next lectures, where we will actually show you how to use ProM Lite and how to interpret the analysis results. Hope to see you again soon.