Computing manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Balanced Multi-Perspective Checking of Process Conformance

Abstract Organizations maintain process models that describe or prescribe how cases (e.g., orders) are handled. However, reality may not agree with what is modeled. Conformance checking techniques reveal and diagnose differences between the behavior that is modeled and what is observed. Existing con-formance checking approaches tend to focus on the control-flow in a process, while abstracting from data dependencies, resource assignments, and time con-straints. Even in those situations when other perspectives are considered, the control-flow is aligned first, i.e., priority is given to this perspective. Data de-pendencies, resource assignments, and time constraints are only considered as “second-class citizens”, which can lead to misleading conformance diagnostics. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed that balances the deviations with respect to all these perspectives based on a customizable cost function. Eval-uations using both synthetic and real data sets show that a multi-perspective approach is indeed feasible and may help to circumvent misleading results as generated by classical single-perspective or staged approaches