Monitoring object-centric Business Processes: An Empirical Study

Universität Ulm

Presentation at the RCIS;

Lisa Arnold, Korfu, Griechenland, 25 May 2023, 2:00 PM

Monitoring dashboards provide an appropriate way of presenting a multitude of information on running business processes to involved actors. Essential components of a monitoring dashboard are charts that visualise this information in an aggregated, intuitive and useful way. A popular representative is the Sunburst Chart, which constitutes a pie chart with several colour-coded circles that can visualise a hierarchical structure. This visualisation technique seems to be particularly suited for monitoring object-centric processes. In this paper a procedure for automatically deriving a sunburst chart from the patterns of a relational process structure, describing an object-centric process, is presented. To investigate the readability, comprehension, and general acceptance of sunburst chart in the context of a monitoring object-centric process, an empirical study with 157 participants was conducted. As key observation of this study, the majority of the participants can read and comprehend the sunburst chart very well, e.g., on average more than 90% of the multiple-choice questions were answered correctly. Overall, sunburst charts offer promising perspective for the monitoring of large object-centric process.