Repairing Alignments: Striking the Right Nerve

Process Mining is concerned with the analysis, understanding and improvement of business processes. One of the most important branches of process mining is conformance checking, i.e. assessing towhat extend a business process model conforms to observed business process execution data, stored in event logs. Alignments are the de facto standard instrument to compute conformance statistics. Alignments map elements of an event log onto activities present in a business process model. Computing alignments is a combinatorial problem and hence, extremely costly. In this paper we show how to compute an alignment for a given process model, using an existing alignment and an existing process model as an input. We show that we are able to eectively repair the existing alignment by updating those parts that no longer t the given process model. Moreover, we show that the potential loss of optimality is limited and stays within acceptable bounds.

keywords: Process Mining, Conformance Checking, Alignments