Timeline-based process discovery

Abstract

A key concern of automatic process discovery is providing insights into business process performance. Process analysts are specifically interested in waiting times and delays for identifying opportunities to speed up processes. Against this backdrop, it is surprising that current techniques for automatic process discovery generate directly-follows graphs and comparable process models without representing the time axis explicitly. This paper presents four layout strategies for automatically constructing process models that explicitly align with a time axis. We exemplify our approaches for directly-follows graphs. We evaluate their effectiveness by applying them to real-world event logs with varying complexities. Our specific focus is on their ability to handle the trade-off between high control-flow abstraction and high consistency of temporal activity order. Our results show that timeline-based layouts provide benefits in terms of an explicit representation of temporal distances. They face challenges for logs with many repeating and concurrent activities.