Trace alignment in process mining: opportunities for process diagnostics

Process mining techniques attempt to extract non-trivial knowledge and interesting insights from event logs. Process mining provides a welcome extension of the repertoire of business process analysis techniques and has been adopted in various commercial BPM systems (BPM|one, Futura Reflect, ARIS PPM, Fujitsu, etc.). Unfortunately, traditional process discovery algorithms have problems dealing with less-structured processes. The resulting models are difficult to comprehend or even misleading. Therefore, we propose a new approach based on trace alignment. The goal is to align traces in a way that event logs can be explored easily. Trace alignment can be used in a preprocessing phase where the event log is investigated or filtered and in later phases where detailed questions need to be answered. Hence, it complements existing process mining techniques focusing on discovery and conformance checking.