Alignment-Based Conformance Checking of Hierarchical Process Models

Abstract

Process mining has received much attention in the field of business process management. Event logs that are generated from information systems can be correlated with the process models for conformance checking. The process models describe event activities at an abstraction level. However, hierarchical business processes, as a kind of typical complex process scenario, describe sub-processes invocation and multi-instantiation patterns. As existing conformance, checking approaches cannot identify sub-processes within hierarchical process models, they cannot be used for conformance checking of hierarchical process models. To handle this limitation, a definition of hierarchically alignment sequences is presented in this paper. Meanwhile, a novel conformance checking approach for hierarchical process models and event logs is proposed. The proposed method has been implemented within the ProM toolkit, which is an open-source process mining software. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, both artificial and real-world event logs are utilized in a comparative analysis against existing state-of-the-art approaches.