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How well did it recover? Impact-aware conformance checking

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Abstract

Alignment-based conformance checking techniques detect and quantify discrepancies between process execution and the expected behavior as depicted in process models. However, often when deviations from the expected behavior occur, additional actions are needed to remedy and restore the process state. These would seem as further reducing conformance according to existing measures. This paper presents a conformance checking approach which considers the response to and recovery from unexpected deviations during process execution, by analyzing the data updates involved and their impact on the expected behavior. We evaluated our approach by applying it to a real-life case study, utilizing different baseline alignment techniques. The results show that our approach succeed to capture adapted behavior in response to deviations and may provide insights concerning the implications of deviations in the process.

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Notes

  1. In what follows, we may use e and a interchangeably, namely, we may use e in places where an activity is expected. In these cases we will refer to e as its associated activity.

  2. ei precedes ej in σ if ei appears in the sequence before ej, namely, i < j.

  3. https://www.alfresco.com/partners/fluxicon.

  4. Available online at https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-gE3s6BGOs4ItC-cySYKWHJucR_ocyP3.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the Israel Science Foundation under Grant Agreements 856/13 and 669/17. The authors would like to thank Nesi Outmazgin, the IT manager of the academic institute, for his help throughout the case study evaluation and especially in the interpretation of the results.

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Correspondence to Arava Tsoury.

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Tsoury, A., Soffer, P. & Reinhartz-Berger, I. How well did it recover? Impact-aware conformance checking. Computing 103, 3–27 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-020-00857-y

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