Automatic Repair of Same-Timestamp Errors in Business Process Event Logs

Abstract

This paper contributes an approach for automatically correcting “same timestamp” errors in business process event logs. These errors consist in multiple events exhibiting the same timestamp within a given process instance. Such errors are common in practice and can be due to the logging granularity or the performance load of the logging system. Analyzing logs that have not been properly screened for such problems is likely to lead to wrong or misleading process insights. The proposed approach revolves around two techniques: one to reorder events with same-timestamp errors, the other to assign an estimated timestamp to each such event. The approach has been implemented in a software prototyp..