Conformance Checking

Abstract

After covering control-flow discovery in depth in Part III, this chapter looks at the situation in which both a process model and an event log are given. The model may have been constructed by hand or may have been discovered. Moreover, the model may be normative or descriptive. Conformance checking relates events in the event log to activities in the process model and compares both. The goal is to find commonalities and discrepancies between the modeled behavior and the observed behavior. Conformance checking is relevant for business alignment and auditing. For example, the event log can be replayed on top of the process model to find undesirable deviations suggesting fraud or inefficiencies. Moreover, conformance checking techniques can also be used for measuring the performance of process discovery algorithms and to repair models that are not aligned well with reality.