During the execution of software, tremendous amounts of data can be recorded. By exploiting the execution data, one can discover behavioral models to describe the actual software execution. As a well-known open-source process mining toolkit, ProM integrates quantities of process mining techniques and enjoys a variety of applications in a broad range of areas. How to develop a better ProM software, both from user experience and software performance perspective, are of vital importance. To achieve this goal, we need to investigate the real execution behavior of ProM which can provide useful insights on its usage and how it responds to user operations. This paper aims to propose an effective approach to solve this problem. To this end, we first instrument existing ProM framework to capture execution logs without changing its architecture. Then a two-layered framework is introduced to support accurate ProM behavior discovery by characterizing both user interaction behavior and plug-in calling behavior separately. Next, detailed discovery techniques to obtain user interaction behavior model and plug-in calling behavior model are proposed. All proposed approaches have been implemented.

Both the clonal selection algorithm (CSA) and the ant colony optimization (ACO) are inspired by natural phenomena and are effective tools for solving complex problems. CSA can exploit and explore the solution space parallely and effectively. However, it can not use enough environment feedback information and thus has to do a large redundancy repeat during search. On the other hand, ACO is based on the concept of indirect cooperative foraging process via secreting pheromones. Its positive feedback ability is nice but its convergence speed is slow because of the little initial pheromones. In this paper, we propose a pheromone-linker to combine these two algorithms. The proposed hybrid clonal selection and ant colony optimization (CSA-ACO) reasonably utilizes the superiorities of both algorithms and also overcomes their inherent disadvantages. Simulation results based on the traveling salesman problems have demonstrated the merit of the proposed algorithm over some traditional techniques.

Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm is simple and effective. Since DE has been proposed, it has been widely used to solve various complex optimization problems. To further exploit the advantages of DE, we propose a new variant of DE, termed as ranking-based differential evolution (RDE), by performing ranking on the population. Progressively better individuals in the population are used for mutation operation, thus improving the algorithm's exploitation and exploration capability. Experimental results on a number of benchmark optimization functions show that RDE significantly outperforms the original DE and performs competitively in comparison with other two state-of-the-art DE variants.

In this paper, we propose a stochastic dynamic local search (SDLS) method for Multiple-Valued Logic (MVL) learning by introducing stochastic dynamics into the traditional local search method. The proposed learning network maintains some trends of quick descent to either global minimum or a local minimum, and at the same time has some chance of escaping from local minima by permitting temporary error increases during learning. Thus the network may eventually reach the global minimum state or its best approximation with very high probability. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has the superior abilities to find the global minimum for the MVL network learning within reasonable number of iterations.