TY - JOUR A1 - Weidlich, Matthias A1 - Polyvyanyy, Artem A1 - Mendling, Jan A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Causal behavioural profiles - efficient computation, applications, and evaluation JF - Fundamenta informaticae N2 - Analysis of behavioural consistency is an important aspect of software engineering. In process and service management, consistency verification of behavioural models has manifold applications. For instance, a business process model used as system specification and a corresponding workflow model used as implementation have to be consistent. Another example would be the analysis to what degree a process log of executed business operations is consistent with the corresponding normative process model. Typically, existing notions of behaviour equivalence, such as bisimulation and trace equivalence, are applied as consistency notions. Still, these notions are exponential in computation and yield a Boolean result. In many cases, however, a quantification of behavioural deviation is needed along with concepts to isolate the source of deviation. In this article, we propose causal behavioural profiles as the basis for a consistency notion. These profiles capture essential behavioural information, such as order, exclusiveness, and causality between pairs of activities of a process model. Consistency based on these profiles is weaker than trace equivalence, but can be computed efficiently for a broad class of models. In this article, we introduce techniques for the computation of causal behavioural profiles using structural decomposition techniques for sound free-choice workflow systems if unstructured net fragments are acyclic or can be traced back to S-or T-nets. We also elaborate on the findings of applying our technique to three industry model collections. KW - Causal Behavioural Profiles KW - Formal Methods KW - Behavioural Abstraction KW - Structural Decomposition KW - Exclusiveness KW - Concurrency KW - Order Relations KW - Causality KW - Optionality Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3233/FI-2011-614 SN - 0169-2968 VL - 113 IS - 3-4 SP - 399 EP - 435 PB - IOS Press CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Weidlich, Matthias A1 - Polyvyanyy, Artem A1 - Desai, Nirmit A1 - Mendling, Jan A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Process compliance analysis based on behavioural profiles JF - Information systems N2 - Process compliance measurement is getting increasing attention in companies due to stricter legal requirements and market pressure for operational excellence. In order to judge on compliance of the business processing, the degree of behavioural deviation of a case, i.e., an observed execution sequence, is quantified with respect to a process model (referred to as fitness, or recall). Recently, different compliance measures have been proposed. Still, nearly all of them are grounded on state-based techniques and the trace equivalence criterion, in particular. As a consequence, these approaches have to deal with the state explosion problem. In this paper, we argue that a behavioural abstraction may be leveraged to measure the compliance of a process log - a collection of cases. To this end, we utilise causal behavioural profiles that capture the behavioural characteristics of process models and cases, and can be computed efficiently. We propose different compliance measures based on these profiles, discuss the impact of noise in process logs on our measures, and show how diagnostic information on non-compliance is derived. As a validation, we report on findings of applying our approach in a case study with an international service provider. KW - Process compliance KW - Compliance measurement KW - Log conformance KW - Root cause analysis Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2011.04.002 SN - 0306-4379 VL - 36 IS - 7 SP - 1009 EP - 1025 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER -