Decision support based on process mining

Process mining techniques allow for the analysis of business processes based on event logs. For example, the audit trails of a workflow management system, the transaction logs of an enterprise resource planning system, and the electronic patient records in a hospital can be used to discover models describing processes, organizations, and products. Moreover, such event logs can also be used to compare event logs with some a-priori model to see whether the observed reality conforms to some prescriptive or descriptive model. This chapter takes the MXML format as a starting point, i. e., a format that stores event logs in a unified manner. Based on this format, we will show how process mining techniques can be used to support decision making in business processes.