Behavioral conformance of artifact-centric process models

Abstract

The use of process models in business information systems for analysis, execution, and improvement of processes assumes that the models describe reality. Conformance checking is a technique to validate how good a given process model describes recorded executions of the actual process. Recently, artifacts have been proposed as a paradigm to capture dynamic, and inter-organizational processes in a more natural way. In artifact-centric processes, several restrictions and assumptions of classical processes are dropped. This renders checking their conformance a more general problem. In this paper, we study the conformance problem of such processes. We show how to partition the problem into behavioral conformance of single artifacts and interaction conformance between artifacts, and solve behavioral conformance by a reduction to existing techniques. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.