Decision Mining in the Rail Industry: A Case Study in the Context of an Industrial Wheelset Revision Process

Process mining has led to new avenues of analysis and better process understanding. However, the role of decisions within the modeling and analysis of processes is underexplored. Following design science, a methodology for integrated process and decision mining was developed, based on the synthesis of an established process mining project methodology and a systematic literature review of existing decision mining approaches. The methodology was applied and evaluated in a case study at the Dutch national railway company. The results demonstrated that the addition of a decision perspective to process models allows for better process understanding. In addition, the evaluation identified a new form of conformance checking that can be used to validate whether the process was executed correctly in accordance with the decisions taken.