Towards Robust Conformance Checking

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 [1], we provide a robust method for calculating conformance between a log and a process model. First, we introduce flexible models that provide an abstraction of many languages and allow for the modeling of complex control flow constructs, such as OR-split/joins and multiple tasks that represent the same activity. We provide semantics for these models, but without specifying how to execute them. Instead, we show that in the context of a case that has been recorded in the log, we can construct instances of the model that maxi-mize certain conformance metrics. Finally, using experiments on simulated dat