The happy path

Although a process may contain only a limited set of activities, the number of possible flows is typically huge! In real-life situations, a lot of activities can take place in any order and can be repeated a certain number of times.

The sequence of activities performed in relation to one case is called its trace, literally the trace that the process instance leaves in our data. Instances of the same process can have very different traces. However, we will typically find one or more very common ones. These frequent sequences are also called the happy path(s) of the process.

Let's have a look at the journey of the patients in the hospital!