Improving the Usability of Process Change Trees Based on Change Similarity Measures

Flexible process management systems store information about conducted process change operations in change logs. Change log analysis can provide users who are responsible for planning and executing upcoming adaptations with valuable information. Change trees represent change logs emphasizing the temporal relation between change operations such that users can immediately see which change sequences have been applied in the past. Similar to most process mining approaches, change trees currently build upon label equivalence. However, labels only provide restricted information about a change operation. Hence this paper investigates how process change similarity can be employed to compare changes, i.e., similar change operations are aggregated in the tree as they appear in a change sequence. A user experiment shows the increased efficiency of the aggregated change sequences: users find relevant information faster than in a change tree based on label equivalence.