Conformance checking artefacts through weighted partial MaxSAT

Abstract

Conformance checking techniques are based on the computation of artefacts which enable the reasoning about observed behaviour of processes and their models. A family of these related artefacts, alignments, multi- and anti-alignments are defined over a distance function between observed behaviour and model replay, both represented as words from a given alphabet. Encoding this distance function, commonly the Levenshtein distance, into MaxSAT enables us to take advantage of state-of-the-art MaxSAT solvers. In this paper we provide an improvement upon previous SAT encodings for the alignment artefact family. We achieve a reduction in the resulting formula size while also obtaining good performance results on the computation of the artefacts. Additionally, we provide its direct extension that allows to easily change the cost function for the alignment computation and show the implementation of two particular examples from the literature: prefix matching prioritization and synchronization maximization.