Conformance Checking: Relating Processes and Models

This book introduces readers to the field of conformance checking as a whole and outlines the fundamental relation between modelled and recorded behaviour. Conformance checking interrelates the modelled and recorded behaviour of a given process and provides techniques and methods for comparing and analysing observed instances of a process in the presence of a model, independent of the model’s origin. Its goal is to provide an overview of the essential techniques and methods in this field at an intuitive level, together with precise formalisations of its underlying principles.

The book is divided into three parts, that are meant to cover different perspectives of the field of conformance checking. Part I presents a comprehensive yet accessible overview of the essential concepts used to interrelate modelled and recorded behaviour. It also serves as a reference for assessing how conformance checking efforts could be applied in specific domains. Next, Part IIprovides readers with detailed insights into algorithms for conformance checking, including the most commonly used formal notions and their instantiation for specific analysis questions. Lastly, Part III highlights applications that help to make sense of conformance checking results, thereby providing a necessary next step to increase the value of a given process model. They help to interpret the outcomes of conformance checking and incorporate them by means of enhancement and repair techniques.

Providing the core building blocks of conformance checking and describing its main applications, this book mainly addresses students specializing in business process management, researchers entering process mining and conformance checking for the first time, and advanced professionals whose work involves process evaluation, modelling and optimization.

Josep Carmona is an associate professor at the Computer Science Department of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain. He has taught process mining to students and practitioners for a decade in several countries. He is also an active researcher in process mining, business process mangament, formal methods and data science. He is involved in several open-source projects related to these fields. 

Boudewijn van Dongen is chair of the process analytics research group at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Eindhoven University of Technology. He has been an active researcher in the field of process mining since the first papers on the topic appeared in the late nineties and today he focusses on both fundamental questions in the area of conformance checking as well as the engineering aspects thereof. His research group maintains the process mining framework ProM which allows students, researchers and practitionersworldwide to contribute to state-of-the-art developments in process mining.

Andreas Solti is a post doctoral researcher with the Institute for Information Business at the Vienna University of Economics and Business (Austria). His research interests are in the area process mining, process analytics, optimization, and sensor data analytics. He is also interested in adaptive learning technologies that can be supported with machine learning and natural language processing.

Matthias Weidlich heads a research group at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany. His research interests include process-oriented and event-driven information systems. Specifically, his group develops formal methods for the specification and verification of such systems, their analysis based on event data, and techniques that optimise their run-time behaviour.