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Computing Alignments of Well-Formed Process Models using Local Search

Published: 01 June 2020 Publication History

Abstract

The alignment of observed and modeled behavior is an essential element for organizations, since it opens the door for conformance checking and enhancement of processes. The state-of-the-art technique for computing alignments has exponential time and space complexity, hindering its applicability for medium and large instances. In this article, a novel approach is presented to tackle the challenge of computing an alignment for large-problem instances that correspond to well-formed process models. Given an observed trace, first it uses a novel replay technique to find an initial candidate trace in the model. Then a local search framework is applied to try to improve the alignment until no further improvement is possible. The implementation of the presented technique reveals a magnificent reduction both in computation time and in memory usage. Moreover, although the proposed technique does not guarantee the derivation of an alignment with minimal cost, the experiments show that in practice the quality of the obtained solutions is close to optimal.

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  1. Computing Alignments of Well-Formed Process Models using Local Search

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
    ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology  Volume 29, Issue 3
    July 2020
    292 pages
    ISSN:1049-331X
    EISSN:1557-7392
    DOI:10.1145/3403667
    • Editor:
    • Mauro Pezzè
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 01 June 2020
    Online AM: 07 May 2020
    Accepted: 01 February 2020
    Revised: 01 December 2019
    Received: 01 June 2018
    Published in TOSEM Volume 29, Issue 3

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    Author Tags

    1. Process mining
    2. conformance checking
    3. event logs
    4. process models

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    • MINECO and FEDER

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    • (2023)Analysis, Evaluation and Reusability of Virtual Laboratory Software Based on Conceptual Modeling and Conformance CheckingMathematics10.3390/math1109215311:9(2153)Online publication date: 4-May-2023
    • (2023)Conformance checking artefacts through weighted partial MaxSATInformation Systems10.1016/j.is.2023.102168114(102168)Online publication date: Mar-2023
    • (2022)Context-Aware Trace Alignment with Automated Planning2022 4th International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM)10.1109/ICPM57379.2022.9980649(104-111)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
    • (2022)Conformance Checking: Foundations, Milestones and ChallengesProcess Mining Handbook10.1007/978-3-031-08848-3_5(155-190)Online publication date: 27-Jun-2022
    • (2021)Partial MaxSAT Computation of Conformance Checking Artefacts2021 3rd International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM)10.1109/ICPM53251.2021.9576889(17-24)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2021
    • (2021) An A * -Algorithm for Computing Discounted Anti-Alignments in Process Mining 2021 3rd International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM)10.1109/ICPM53251.2021.9576887(25-31)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2021
    • (2021)A Measure Consistency Method for Overlapping Correspondence of Workflow Nets Based on Relation Profiles Partner MatrixIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2021.30847449(79766-79775)Online publication date: 2021
    • (2021)Empowering conformance checking using Big Data through horizontal decompositionInformation Systems10.1016/j.is.2021.10173199(101731)Online publication date: Jul-2021
    • (2021)A Discounted Cost Function for Fast Alignments of Business ProcessesBusiness Process Management10.1007/978-3-030-85469-0_17(252-269)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2021

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