Timed Alignments

TL;DR

This paper addresses conformance checking for time-aware process models by developing algorithms for timed alignments, enabling efficient correction of observed traces to conform with process models considering timestamps.

Contribution

It introduces the timed alignment problem and provides two algorithms with different complexities for aligning time-stamped process traces.

Findings

Linear time algorithm for one case of timed alignment

Quadratic time algorithm for linear process models

Enhances conformance checking with time constraints

Abstract

The subject of this paper is to study conformance checking for timed models, that is, process models that consider both the sequence of events in a process as well as the timestamps at which each event is recorded. Time-aware process mining is a growing subfield of research, and as tools that seek to discover timing related properties in processes develop, so does the need for conformance checking techniques that can tackle time constraints and provide insightful quality measures for time-aware process models. In particular, one of the most useful conformance artefacts is the alignment, that is, finding the minimal changes necessary to correct a new observation to conform to a process model. In this paper, we set our problem of timed alignment and solve two cases each corresponding to a different metric over time processes. For the first, we have an algorithm whose time complexity is linear both in the size of the observed trace and the process model, while for the second we have a quadratic time algorithm for linear process models.