Being able to visually explore process attributes and their values supports process analysts in process understanding and optimization. The complexity of the analysis can range from a few to a variety of attributes, e.g., machining times and sensor parameter in the manufacturing domain. This paper introduces an innovative prototype to visualize process attributes within a 3D representation. The 3D representation can be displayed and explored on a monitor or a virtual reality system.
More and more data from various sources such as databases, services, and
realtime information is present in nowadays business processes. Incorporating as
much information as available into a process seems a good thing at rst.
However, companies need to understand their processes to achieve their business
goals. In order to support the analysis in such cases we use process models for
visualization. Such visualizations often comprise a plethora of attributes, e.g.,
machining parameters in production processes. These attributes are crucial in
understanding processes models. Various approaches e.g. views and abstractions
[
To reduce the amount of information being lost as part of the visualization process we developed a prototype called 3DViz. This prototype allows to incorporate multiple attributes within one representation by using the additional z-axis. Analyzing and understanding a business process can be a complex and overwhelming task. Some visualization approaches only show the control ow elements and hide process attributes such as time within menus. However, attributes can yield crucial information for process analysts. The most commonly visualized attribute is the Role attribute, however there are certainly many more relevant attributes within business processes e.g. data elements and resources. These attributes can have di erent manifestations, e.g., cost, time and location. These manifestations are not prede ned; they can be di erent in each process model. One model uses only cost while another one requires a new attribute and the next model has three or more attributes. This even gets worse as those attributes might possess di erent data types like string or numerical values. Our prototype allows for visualizing multiple attributes within a single representation. 2.1
We introduce a novel 3D Process Visualization prototype called 3DViz. 3DViz
and an overview on the design choices are explained in the following section,
details can be found in the technical report [
3DViz allows for visualizing process models within a 3 dimensional space, hence allowing for utilizing an additional axis for process model visualization. The 3D models enable positioning of activities on the x-axis, y-axis, and z-axis and scaling of activities on these three axes. For activity positioning, 3DViz is capable of attribute visualization on y-axis and z-axis. X-axis is restricted to a processes control ow.
Currently, we support up to 5 di erent attributes within a process model.
We could utilize more visual styles e.g., brightness, texture, and orientation
to incorporate more attributes within one visualization. However, the principle
of graphic economy [
In order to provide complexity management mechanisms we allow the user to customize the amount of attributes and the visual styles used. Numerical attribute values can be mapped to every axis for positioning and scaling. String values are restricted to positioning within swimlanes on the y-axis and z-axis.
Figure 1 depicts a sample process with 3DViz. When analyzing a process there are two important axes, the positioning axis and the scaling axis. In this example positioning axis in Fig. 1 1jdepicts Roles as swimlanes on the z-axis and Cost on the y-axis. Positioning Cost on the y-axis leads to a visualization where activities with high costs are displayed above activities with lower costs 2j. The scaling axis is visualized with colors 3j. This axis shows that Time is scaled on the x-axis and Data Usage is scaled on the y-axis. 4jdepicts an activity scaled on the y-axis. This activity possesses the highest amount of Data Usage. Additionally a room (e.g., a seminar room or an o ce) is created around the process model to ease navigation and orientation while exploring the model.
In 3DViz, control ow elements (cf. Fig. 1) are designed similarly to their 2D counterparts in BPMN. The motivation behind this decision is to provide a familiar setup to reduce training e orts. 2.2
Literature suggests that viewing a 3D model on a monitor might not be an
appropriate way to transport the visual delity introduced by a 3D model [
From a visual point of view the model is represented in the same way as the 3DViz model. For this reason we want to refer to Figure 1 for a process model visualization example. The main di erence is the interaction with the model. While 3DViz requires mouse and keyboard input for interactions, e.g., camera movement, the VR approach allows camera movement when the VR device is moved, i.e., moving the head forward while wearing the device will translate to movement within the virtual world.
Within 3DViz a room is created around the process model. For the VR approach the visualization of a room o ers additional bene ts. A room might help to avoid dizziness and disorientation when exploring the process model. In its current state the applicability of VR/AR is poor compared to Desktop systems. However, when considering the development in recent years we believe VR/AR will advance further and be better integrated in the normal day routine of people. 2.3
In the previous sections the visualization capabilities of the prototype are brie y
discussed and depicted in Figure 1. Figure 2 depicts the con guration menu. Nine
di erent styles for attribute visualization are available. For each style the user
can select an attribute and a mapping e.g. on the z-axis the role is visualized with
discrete mapping. For the attribute mapping we allow for 3 di erent variants,
direct mapping, relative mapping and discrete mapping [
Additionally we conducted a survey addressing applicability and usability of
3D visualizations. From the 42 participants 39 (92.8%) answered that 3D
visualizations are useful for process model visualization. Further we asked which
areas are particularly interesting when 3D visualizations are used. In total 33
(80.5%) participants answered that combining multiple attributes is an
interesting eld. Allowing the user to change the viewing angel an rotate around the
process model was also very well received by 31 (75.6%) participants. However,
to our surprise only 11 (26.8%) thought that 3D representations are particularly
useful to omit overlapping edges. More insights on survey design, demographic
data, results and discussion can be found in our technical report [
An evaluation targeting the performance of 3DViz was conducted [
3DViz o ers an innovative approach to visualize process models and their attributes. Attributes can be visualized by scaling or positioning of nodes. Scaling and positioning on the x-axis, y-axis and z-axis allows to incorporated multiple attributes within one visualization. Integrating multiple attributes leads to faster recognition of associations between attributes.
We are currently working on expanding 3DViz capabilities towards mining and monitoring. Further we want to explore the visualization of multiple processes in combination with constraint visualization.
The prototype, a tutorial, a short video and further information is available on our website3.
Acknowledgment This work has been funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund (WWTF) through project ICT15-072.
3 https://bit.ly/2wTT5za