Abduction for Generating Synthetic Traces

In this paper we report our preliminary experience on the design of a generator of synthetic logs. Sometimes real logs might not be available, or their quality might not be good enough: synthetic logs instead can be generated with all the desired features and characteristics. Our tool takes as input a structured workflow model, encoded in the abductive declarative language SCIFF, and provides as output a log containing positive traces, i.e. traces deemed as conformant w.r.t. the model. Distinctive features of our approach are the capability of generating trace templates as well as grounded traces, the possibility of taking into account user-specified constraints on data and timestamps, and the capability of generating traces starting from a user-specified partial trace. Although our tool is still in its preliminary version, we have successfully exploited it to generate synthetic logs of different dimension, thus proving the viability of our approach.