R Tutorial : Components of process data

Want to learn more? Take the full course at https://learn.datacamp.com/courses/business-process-analytics-in-r at your own pace. More than a video, you'll learn hands-on coding & quickly apply skills to your daily work. --- So far, we are already familiar with two important components in a process. The activities are the steps undertaken in the process, the actions. And the cases are the objects flowing through the process on which the actions are performed. In this lesson, we will learn about the distinction between activity instances and events and the transactional lifecycle in a process. At the end of this chapter, you will be able to define your own event data objects in R! When a specific action takes place for a specific case, this is called an activity instance: the execution of an activity in a specific context at a certain point in time. In this example, we see three activity instances, containing two different activities: Registration and X-ray, and two different patients: Emily and John. In this example, we can see the time at which both the registration and the X-ray started. However, activities rarely happen instantly; they usually take some time. An activity instance, therefore, can consist of a series of events. If we take a closer look at the X-Ray activity execution for John, we would see that it was scheduled during the registration at 9:51. It actually started at 10:42, and was finished at 10:58. Each of these time recordings is called an event. One or more events together can form an activity instance; three in this case. The type of event -schedule, start, complete- is called the lifecycle status. In reality, there can be many different statuses: assign, schedule, start, suspend, resume, abort. For simplicity, we will only use the most commons ones in this course - start and complete. A logbook of events is called an event log. For our current example, the event log looks as shown here. There are two registration instances, for which o