A Framework for Online Conformance Checking

Conformance checking - a branch of process mining - focuses on establishing to what extent actual executions of a process are in line with the expected behavior of a reference model. Current conformance checking techniques only allow for a-posteriori analysis: the amount of (non-) conformant behavior is quantified after the completion of the process instance. In this paper we propose a framework for online conformance checking: not only do we quantify (non-) conformant behavior as the execution is running, we also restrict the computation to constant time complexity per event analyzed, thus enabling the online analysis of a stream of events. The framework is instantiated with ideas coming from the theory of regions, and state similarity. An implementation is available in ProM and promising results have been obtained.