Process Mining Meets Visual Analytics: The Case of Conformance Checking

Conformance checking is a major function of process mining, which allows organizations to identify and alleviate potential deviations from the intended process behavior. To fully leverage its benefits, it is important that conformance checking results are visualized in a way that is approachable and understandable for non-expert users. However, the visualization of conformance checking results has so far not been widely considered in research. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to develop an understanding of how conformance checking results are visualized by process mining tools to provide a foundation for further research on this topic. We conduct a systematic study, where we analyze the visualization capabilities of nine academic and seven commercial tools by means of a visual analytics framework. In this study, we find that the “Why?” aspect of conformance checking visualization seems already be well-defined, but the “What?” and “How?” aspects require future research.