Turning event logs into process movies : animating what has really happened

Today's information systems log vast amount of data which contains information about the actual execution of business processes. The analysis of this data can provide a solid starting point for business process improvement. This is the realm of process mining, an area which has provided a repertoire of many analysis techniques. Despite the impressive capabilities of existing process mining algorithms, dealing with the abundance of data recorded by contemporary systems and devices remains a challenge. Of particular importance is the capability to guide the meaningful interpretation of this 'ocean' of data by process analysts. To this end, insights from the field of visual analytics can be leveraged. An approach is proposed where process states are reconstructed from event logs and visualised in succession, leading to an animated history of a process. This approach is customisable in how a process state, partially defined through a collection of activity instances, is visualised: one can select a map and specify a projection of activity instances on this map based on their properties. In this paper an implementation of the proposal is described for the open-source process-mining framework ProM along with reporting an evaluation with one of Australia's largest insurance companies: Suncorp.