Object-Centric Conformance Alignments with Synchronization

Alessandro Gianola, Marco Montali, Sarah Winkler

Abstract: Real-world processes operate on objects that are inter-dependent. To accurately reflect the nature of such processes, object-centric process mining techniques are needed, notably conformance checking. However, while the object-centric perspective has recently gained traction, few concrete process mining techniques have been presented so far. Moreover, existing approaches are severely limited in their abilities to keep track of object identity and object dependencies. Consequently, serious problems in event logs with object information remain undetected. This paper, presents a new formalism that combines the key modelling features of two existing approaches, notably the ability of object-centric Petri nets to capture one-to-many relations and the ability of Petri nets with identifiers to compare and synchronize objects based on their identity. We call the resulting formalism object-centric Petri nets with identifiers, and define alignments and the conformance checking task for this setting. We propose a conformance checking approach for such nets based on an encoding in satisfiability modulo theories (SMT), and illustrate how it serves to effectively overcome shortcomings of earlier work. To assess its practicality, we evaluate it on data from the literature.