Repairing alignments: Striking the right nerve

Abstract

Process Mining is concerned with the analysis, understanding and improvement of business processes. One of the most important branches of process mining is conformance checking, i.e. assessing to what extent a business process model conforms to observed business process execution data. Alignments are the de facto standard instrument to compute conformance statistics. Alignments map elements of an event log onto activities present in a business process model. However, computing them is a combinatorial problem and hence, extremely costly. In this paper we show how to compute an alignment for a given process model, using an existing alignment and an existing process model as a basis. We show that we are able to effectively repair the existing alignment by updating those parts that no longer fit the given process model. Thus, computation time decreases significantly. Moreover, we show that the potential loss of optimality is limited and stays within acceptable bounds.