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Object-Centric Alignments

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Conceptual Modeling (ER 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14320))

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Abstract

Processes tend to interact with other processes and operate on various objects of different types. These objects can influence each other creating dependencies between sub-processes. Analyzing the conformance of such complex processes challenges traditional conformance-checking approaches because they assume a single-case identifier for a process. To create a single-case identifier one has to flatten complex processes. This leads to information loss when separating the processes that interact on some objects. This paper introduces an alignment approach that operates directly on these object-centric processes. We introduce alignments that can give behavior-based insights into how closely related the event data generated by a process and the behavior specified by an object-centric Petri net are. The contributions of this paper include a definition for object-centric alignments, an algorithm to compute them, a publicly available implementation, and a qualitative and quantitative evaluation. The qualitative evaluation shows that object-centric alignments can give better insights into object-centric processes because they correctly consider inter-object dependencies. Findings from the quantitative evaluation show that the run-time grows exponentially with the number of objects, the length of the process execution, and the cost of the alignment. The evaluation results motivate future research to improve the run-time and make object-centric alignments more applicable for larger processes.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/LukasLiss/object-centric-alignments.

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Acknowledgment

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

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Lukas Liss, Jan Niklas Adams & Wil M. P. van der Aalst

Authors
  1. Lukas Liss
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  2. Jan Niklas Adams
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  3. Wil M. P. van der Aalst
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Lukas Liss , Jan Niklas Adams or Wil M. P. van der Aalst .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Federal University of Espírito Santo, Vitória, Brazil

    João Paulo A. Almeida

  2. Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    José Borbinha

  3. University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

    Giancarlo Guizzardi

  4. University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand

    Sebastian Link

  5. Stockholm University, Kista, Sweden

    Jelena Zdravkovic

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Liss, L., Adams, J.N., van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2023). Object-Centric Alignments. In: Almeida, J.P.A., Borbinha, J., Guizzardi, G., Link, S., Zdravkovic, J. (eds) Conceptual Modeling. ER 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14320. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47262-6_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47262-6_11

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