Conformance Checking of Interacting Processes with Overlapping Instances

Abstract

The usefulness of process models (e.g., for analysis, improvement, or execution) strongly depends on their ability to describe reality. Conformance checking is a technique to validate how good a given process model describes recorded executions of the actual process. Recently, artifacts have been proposed as a paradigm to capture dynamic, and inter-organizational processes in a more natural way. Artifact-centric processes drop several restrictions and assumptions of classical processes. In particular, process instances cannot be considered in isolation as instances in artifact-centric processes may overlap and interact with each other. This significantly complicates conformance checking; the entanglement of different instances complicates the quantification and diagnosis of misalignments. This paper is the first paper to address this problem. We show how conformance checking of artifact-centric processes can be decomposed into a set of smaller problems that can be analyzed using conventional techniques.