Conformance Checking of the Activity Network with the Social Relationships Structure in the Context of Social Commerce

Abstract

Control and management of e-markets are one of the essential needs in social commerce context. Social commerce systems include not only informational flows, financial and goods/services but also social relationships and interactions. The focus of this research is to find the meaningful relationship between social relations and the network of various commercial flows among human resources (i.e., activity network) in social commerce context. If the activity network conforms with social relations, then business processes and, in general, the e-market can be steered by social relations. The proposed research framework has been constructed from a combination of process mining concepts, multi-layered network modeling, network analyzing, and social theories. Such a combination in the conformance checking field is an original contribution of this study, not yet explored. Two simulated sample datasets in four different versions are applied for the evaluation. Furthermore, Friedman's statistical test is employed to proof of the research hypothesis and gain more confidence in the obtained results. The results indicate that, despite the structural mismatch of the social network with the activity network, social relations affect the formation of business interactions among human resources. This effect is also different for various flow types. Multi-layered network modeling demonstrates this difference.