Conformance Checking Book

The book Conformance Checking – Relating Processes and Models by Josep Carmona, Boudewijn van Dongen, Andreas Solti, and Matthias Weidlich provides an overview of essential techniques and methods for conformance checking based on precise formalisations.

About the Authors   In The Lab Sessions

What the Back Cover Says

This book introduces readers to the field of conformance checking as a whole and outlines the fundamental relation between modelled and recorded behaviour. Conformance checking interrelates the modelled and recorded behaviour of a given process and provides techniques and methods for comparing and analysing observed instances of a process in the presence of a model, independent of the model’s origin. Its goal is to provide an overview of the essential techniques and methods in this field at an intuitive level, together with precise formalisations of its underlying principles.

The book is divided into three parts, that are meant to cover different perspectives of the field of conformance checking. Part I presents a comprehensive yet accessible overview of the essential concepts used to interrelate modelled and recorded behaviour. It also serves as a reference for assessing how conformance checking efforts could be applied in specific domains. Next, Part II provides readers with detailed insights into algorithms for conformance checking, including the most commonly used formal notions and their instantiation for specific analysis questions. Lastly, Part III highlights applications that help to make sense of conformance checking results, thereby providing a necessary next step to increase the value of a given process model. They help to interpret the outcomes of conformance checking and incorporate them by means of enhancement and repair techniques.

Providing the core building blocks of conformance checking and describing its main applications, this book mainly addresses students specializing in business process management, researchers entering process mining and conformance checking for the first time, and advanced professionals whose work involves process evaluation, modelling and optimization.

What Others Say

“This long-awaited book paints a comprehensive and enlightening landscape of methods for business process conformance checking. It successfully strikes a sweet spot between providing a pedagogic introduction to the field and deep-diving into technical details for a selected subset of methods. As such, the book is suitable both as a graduate textbook and as a technical reference for researchers and practitioners in the rapidly developing fields of business process analytics and process mining.”
Marlon Dumas, University of Tartu, Estonia

“The book will be a reference for people interested in the intricate relationship between models and reality.”
Wil van der Aalst, RWTH Aachen University, Germany

“This book constitutes an important addition to Business Process Management, as it details concepts, tools and techniques for checking conformance of process execution logs with process models. I congratulate the authors for their efforts.”
John Mylopoulos, University of Toronto, Canada

“The textbook investigates the relationship of process models with what happens on the ground. It is formally precise, yet very accessible, and definitely a must-read for everyone interested in process mining.”
Mathias Weske, HPI, University of Potsdam, Germany

“Written by four BPM experts this is a must-read for everyone interested in conformance checking. The book provides an excellent introduction into conformance checking covering the existing state-of-the art very comprehensively. I can highly recommend the book to students, researchers, and practitioners for an up-to-date knowledge on conformance checking. With the inclusion of exercises and lab sessions the book is also suitable as a textbook.”
Barbara Weber, Technical University of Denmark

Where to Get It