SAP Signavio Process Discovery: Relationship between activities

[LeandroRibeiro]

My question is how process mining in the discovery phase manages to create relationships between activities since the event log only needs the activity name, case ID and timestamp.

How does process mining know that activities A and B were carried out in parallel even though, for example, activity B started later than activity A?

The doubt refers to the "Play-in" technique where we do not have a reference model (to be).

How can the technique create, for example, gateways with just the activity name, case ID, and timestamp? Wouldn't an attribute be necessary within the event log informing the relationship between activities?

Thanks.

[daniel_hesseling · Accepted solution]

Hi Leandro,

The relationship between the activities is given only by the timestamp.
If during a single case the timestamp of activity A is before activity B it will be shown as e.g.: A ->B->C

Gateways will not occur if you are looking at a single process execution but only if you choose several process executions from different variants. In that case the technique might create an XOR gateway:

Variant 1: A->B->C

Variant 2: A->C

Creating a BPMN diagram with the Variant Explorer will show:

In case you have a specific case where the exact same timestamp has been written back into your database for certain activities you can specify the order by e.g. automatically adding an offset of 1ms to the activities which should occur later within the transformation phase.

I hope that answers your question. Best regards
Daniel

[LeandroRibeiro · Accepted solution]

Thank you Daniel.