Process visualization techniques for multi-perspective process comparisons

Organizations executing similar business processes need to understand the differences and similarities in activities performed across work environments. Presently, research interest is directed towards the potential of visualization for the display of process models, to support users in their analysis tasks. Although recent literature in process mining and comparison provide several methods and algorithms to perform process and log comparison, few contributions explore novel visualization techniques. This paper analyzes process comparison from a design perspective, providing some practical visualization techniques as analysis solutions. In order to support the needs of business analysts the design of the visual comparison has been tackled via three different points of view: the general model, the projected model and the side-by-side comparison. A case study is presented showing a preliminary evaluation of the application of process mining and visualization techniques to patient treatment across two Australian hospitals.