Most organizations have process models describing how cases need to be handled. In fact, legislation and standardization (cf. the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Basel II Accord, and the ISO 9000 family of standards) are forcing organizations to document their processes. These processes are often not enforced by information systems. However, torrents of event data are recorded by today’s information systems. These recorded events reflect how processes are really executed. Often reality deviates from the modeled behavior. Therefore, measuring the extent process executions conform to a predefined process model is increasingly important. In this paper, we propose an approach to measure the precision of a process model with respect to an event log. Unlike earlier approaches, we first align model and log thus making our approach more robust, even in case of deviations. The approach has been implemented in the ProM 6 tool and evaluated using both artificial and real life cases.

Peer Reviewed