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A Novel Token-Based Replay Technique to Speed Up Conformance Checking and Process Enhancement

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Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency XV

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((TOPNOC,volume 12530))

Abstract

Token-based replay used to be the standard way to conduct conformance checking. With the uptake of more advanced techniques (e.g., alignment based), token-based replay got abandoned. However, despite decomposition approaches and heuristics to speed-up computation, the more advanced conformance checking techniques have limited scalability, especially when traces get longer and process models more complex. This paper presents an improved token-based replay approach that is much faster and scalable. Moreover, the approach provides more accurate diagnostics that avoid known problems (e.g., “token flooding”) and help to pinpoint compliance problems. The novel token-based replay technique has been implemented in the PM4Py process mining library. We will show that the replay technique outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in terms of speed and/or diagnostics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    With a process discovery technique, a process model is constructed capturing the behavior seen in an event log. See the book [4] for an introduction to the most popular process discovery algorithms.

  2. 2.

    A marking \(M \in \mathcal {B}(P)\) is a place multiset. We denote with \(\mathcal {U}_M\) the universe of markings.

  3. 3.

    During the activation of the sequence, some places could still have missing tokens.

  4. 4.

    The logs are available at the URL https://data.4tu.nl/repository/collection:event_logs.

  5. 5.

    http://pm4py.pads.rwth-aachen.de/documentation/conformance-checking/token-based-replayer/.

  6. 6.

    http://pm4py.pads.rwth-aachen.de/documentation/conformance-checking/token-based-replayer/token-based-replay-diagnostics/.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Stiftung for supporting our research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Process and Data Science Group, RWTH Aachen University, Lehrstuhl für Informatik 9, 52074, Aachen, Germany

    Alessandro Berti & Wil M. P. van der Aalst

  2. Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, Institute for Applied Information Technology (FIT), Sankt Augustin, Germany

    Alessandro Berti & Wil M. P. van der Aalst

Authors
  1. Alessandro Berti
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  2. Wil M. P. van der Aalst
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Correspondence to Alessandro Berti .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Maciej Koutny

  2. Sorbonne Université, Paris, France

    Fabrice Kordon

  3. Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Milan, Italy

    Lucia Pomello

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Berti, A., van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2021). A Novel Token-Based Replay Technique to Speed Up Conformance Checking and Process Enhancement. In: Koutny, M., Kordon, F., Pomello, L. (eds) Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency XV. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12530. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-63079-2_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-63079-2_1

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