Non-Automata Based Conformance Checking of Declarative Process Specifications Based on ASP

Isabelle Kuhlmann, Carl Corea, John Grant

Abstract: We investigate the use of Answer Set Programming (ASP) for the problem of conformance checking of LTL-based Declarative Process Specifications. In particular, we propose ASP solutions that are independent of automata. That is: in related works, the semantics of the declarative process specifications are often captured by means of finite state automata. This means that for conformance checking, the constraints of the specification first have to be transformed into a corresponding automata representation, which introduces a computational burden. In this work, we present a new ASP-based approach which encodes the constraint semantics directly and therefore can be used to check conformance without the need of performing automata operations. We implement our approach and perform experiments with real-life datasets, comparing our approach to a selection of state-of-the-art approaches. Our experiments show that our approach can outperform existing approaches in some cases. Furthermore, our approach can easily be extended to check whether the considered constraint sets are satisfiable (i.e., consistent).