Business Process Impact Visualization and Anomaly Detection

Abstract

Business operations involve many factors and relationships and are modeled as complex business process workflows. The execution of these business processes generates vast volumes of complex data. The operational data are instances of the process flow, taking different paths through the process. The goal is to use the complex information to analyze and improve operations and to optimize the process flow. In this paper, we introduce a new visualization technique, called VisImpact that turns raw operational business data into valuable information. VisImpact reduces data complexity by analyzing operational data and abstracting the most critical factors, called impact factors, which influence business operations. The analysis may identify single nodes of the business flow graph as important factors but it may also determine aggregations of nodes to be important. Moreover, the analysis may find that single nodes have certain data values associated with them which have an influence on some business metrics or resource usage parameters. The impact factors are presented as nodes in a symmetric circular graph, providing insight into core business operations and relationships. A cause-effect mechanism is built in to determine 'good' and 'bad' operational behavior and to take action accordingly. We have applied VisImpact to real-world applications, fraud analysis and service contract analysis, to show the power of VisImpact for finding relationships among the most important impact factors and for immediate identification of anomalies. The VisImpact system provides a highly interactive interface including drilldown capabilities down to transaction levels to allow multilevel views of business dynamics.

The Event Tunnel: Interactive Visualization of Complex Event Streams for Business Process Pattern Analysis

“…The discovery of anomalies in data sets was the subject of many recent research efforts [3] [4]. Our approach is currently limited to a manual anomaly-discovery process supported by the following techniques: Outlier detection in the sector placement policy, accentuation of outliers in event clusters, pattern comparison in the CESP policy, highlighting of abnormal event attribute values by color and size coding and interpretation of temporal accumulations in the event-tunnel top-view and the event-tunnel side-view.…”

“…IEEE Pacific Visualisation Symposium 2008 4 -7 March, Kyoto, Japan 978-1-4244-1966-1/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE Hao et al [4] presented VisImpact, an approach to reduce the complexity of business data by extracting impact factors that identify either single nodes or groups of nodes from business flow diagrams that influence business operations. VisImpact is able to find relationships among the most important impact factors and supports an immediate identification of anomalies.…”

Treemapping Work-Sharing Relationships among Business Process Performers

“…이에 따 라, 비즈니스 프로세스 데이터와 분석 결과를 요약하여 제한된 화면위에 효과적으로 나타내기 위한 시각화 기술 에 대한 관심이 높아지고 있다. 이에 따라 본 절의 관련 연구를 비즈니스 프로세스 모델 시각화 [4][5][6]와 비주얼 애 널리틱스 [7,8] 그림 3의 수행자-업무 소속 네트워크를 다음 표 1과 …”

Temporal Anomaly Detection in Business Processes

“…They assume that a timed model is already present and specified, and consider time boundaries instead of probability density functions, while we strive to detect anomalies that differ from usual behavior and also want to distinguish measurement errors from regular outliers. Hao et al analyze business impact of business data on key performance indicators and visualize them either in aggregated or single views in the model [11]. In contrast, our work leverages information encoded in the structure of the model to find related variables and to detect outliers in continuous space.…”

“…Moreover, the activities are enacted in a distributed fashion and in environments where faults can occur [22]. Thus the analysis of business processes is a highly challenging task [11], even for experts.…”