Hi Ronald ,
ABPD(Automated Business Processing discovery) techniques start from event logs (audit trails, messages, transactions, databases and so forth) and try to discover patterns to fit a process model to the information obtained from the events. The underlying techniques are strong enough so that users don't have to specify a process model; it is created from scratch by pattern recognition. Moreover, it delivers information on bottlenecks, variances, root causes and the distribution of the process instances, thus enabling meaningful simulation. It's all about capturing what has happened in a real-life process.