Dependence-Based Data-Aware Process Conformance Checking

Abstract

Data-aware executable processes are an effective and efficient means to build service-oriented applications. However, since the services involved are loosely-coupled and self-managed, the process is flexible by nature and it executions may deviate from their specifications. In contrast to existing approaches that focus on control flow deviations, we leverage activity dependences for data-aware process conformance checking. To analyze the conformance of a process instance to its process definition, we seek a process reference trace “best-fitting” the instance trace such that the conformance degree of the input trace to the process equals the consistency degree of both traces. We measure the consistency between two traces based on their activity dependences. Since finding the reference trace is NP-hard, we resort to heuristics based on process decomposition and trace replaying to determine the trace. Our approach can identify conformance decrease caused by activity dependence deviations, thus, complementing existing approaches. We implement our approach as a ProM plugin. Experimental results on 102 real-world WS-BPEL processes and 26,880 synthetic input traces confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.