Conformance Checking for Trace Fragments Using Infix and Postfix Alignments

TL;DR

This paper introduces infix and postfix alignments for conformance checking, enabling analysis of partial process traces, and presents methods to compute these alignments with evaluation on real event data.

Contribution

It extends alignment techniques to handle partial traces by defining infix and postfix alignments and proposes computational approaches for these new methods.

Findings

Effective computation methods for infix/postfix alignments.

Successful evaluation on real-life event data.

Enhanced conformance checking for partial process traces.

Abstract

Conformance checking deals with collating modeled process behavior with observed process behavior recorded in event data. Alignments are a state-of-the-art technique to detect, localize, and quantify deviations in process executions, i.e., traces, compared to reference process models. Alignments, however, assume complete process executions covering the entire process from start to finish or prefixes of process executions. This paper defines infix/postfix alignments, proposes approaches to their computation, and evaluates them using real-life event data.