Experimenting with an OLAP approach for interactive discovery in process mining

Abstract

Business process analysts must face the task of analyzing, monitoring and promoting improvements to different business processes. Process mining has emerged as a useful tool for analyzing event logs that are registered by information systems. It allows the discovering of process models considering different perspectives (control-flow, organizational, time). However, currently they lack the ability to explore jointly and interactively the different perspectives, which hinder the understanding of what is happening in the organization. This article proposes a novel approach for interactive discovery aimed at providing process analysts with a tool that allow them to explore multiple perspectives at different levels of detail, which is inspired on OLAP interactive concepts. This approach was implemented as a ProM plug-in and tested in an experiment with real users. Its main advantages are the productivity and operability when performing process discovery.Keywords: Process mining; Business process discovery; OLAP