Cortado—An Interactive Tool for Data-Driven Process Discovery and Modeling

Abstract

Process mining aims to diagnose and improve operational processes. Process mining techniques allow analyzing the event data generated and recorded during the execution of (business) processes to gain valuable insights. Process discovery is a key discipline in process mining that comprises the discovery of process models on the basis of the recorded event data. Most process discovery algorithms work in a fully automated fashion. Apart from adjusting their configuration parameters, conventional process discovery algorithms offer limited to no user interaction, i.e., we either edit the discovered process model by hand or change the algorithm’s input by, for instance, filtering the event data. However, recent work indicates that the integration of domain knowledge in $$\text {(semi-)automated}$$ process discovery algorithms often enhances the quality of the process models discovered. Therefore, this paper introduces Cortado, a novel process discovery tool that leverages domain knowledge while incrementally discovering a process model from given event data. Starting from an initial process model, Cortado enables the user to incrementally add new process behavior to the process model under construction in a visual and intuitive manner. As such, Cortado unifies the world of manual process modeling with that of automated process discovery.