Towards robust conformance checking

Abstract

The growing complexity of processes in many organizations stimulates the adoption of business process management (BPM) techniques. Process models typically lie at the basis of these techniques and generally, the assumption is made that the operational business processes as they are taking place in practice conform to these models. However, recent experience has shown that this often isn't the case. Therefore, the problem of checking to what extent the operational process conforms to the process model is increasingly important. In this paper, we present a robust approach to get insights into the conformance of an operational process to a given process model. We use logs that carry information about which activities have being performed, in which order and we compare these logs to an abstract model. We do not only provide several different conformance metrics, but we show an efficient implementation for the calculation of these metrics. Our approach has been implemented in the ProM framework, evaluated using simulated event logs and compared against an existing conformance technique based on Petri nets. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.