Optimized SAT encoding of conformance checking artefacts

Abstract

Conformance checking is a growing discipline that aims at assisting organizations in monitoring their processes. On its core, conformance checking relies on the computation of particular artefacts which enable reasoning on the relation between observed and modeled behavior. It is widely acknowledge that the computation of these artifacts is the lion’s share of conformance checking techniques. This paper shows how important conformance artefacts like alignments, anti-alignments or multi-alignments, defined over the Levenshtein edit distance, can be efficiently computed by encoding the problem as an optimized SAT instance. From a general perspective, the work advocates for a unified family of techniques that can compute conformance artefacts in the same way. The implementation of the techniques presented in this paper show capabilities for dealing with both synthetic and real-life instances, which may open the door for a fresh way of applying conformance checking in the near future.