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Conformance checking in UML artifact-centric business process models

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Abstract

Business artifacts have appeared as a new paradigm to capture the information required for the complete execution and reasoning of a business process. Likewise, conformance checking is gaining popularity as a crucial technique that enables evaluating whether recorded executions of a process match its corresponding model. In this paper, conformance checking techniques are incorporated into a general framework to specify business artifacts. By relying on the expressive power of an artifact-centric specification, BAUML, which combines UML state and activity diagrams (among others), the problem of conformance checking can be mapped into the Petri net formalism and its results be explained in terms of the original artifact-centric specification. In contrast to most existing approaches, ours incorporates data constraints into the Petri nets, thus achieving conformance results which are more precise. We have also implemented a plug-in, within the ProM framework, which is able to translate a BAUML into a Petri net to perform conformance checking. This shows the feasibility of our approach.

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Notes

  1. To allow for a simple formalization, these extensions will not be formalized here and only be considered informally when needed in the next section.

  2. http://www.promtools.org/.

  3. We overload the syntax of the Petri nets to incorporate in some of the arcs information on the tag used. This is only to facilitate the translation in the next step, and has no semantics associated.

  4. We introduced this possibility due to appearing often in specifications, but as Fig. 10 suggests, it is a modification of the one corresponding to the comparison to 0.

  5. http://www.promtools.org/.

  6. https://svn.win.tue.nl/trac/prom/browser/Packages/Specifact.

  7. https://www.visual-paradigm.com.

  8. http://www.xes-standard.org/.

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Acknowledgements

This work is partially supported by FONDECYT Iniciación 11170092 and CONICYT Apoyo a la Formación de Redes Internacionales Para Investigadores en Etapa Inicial REDI170136; by the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, under projects TIN2017-87610-R and TIN2017-86727-C2-1-R; and by the Secreteria d’Universitats i Recerca de la Generalitat de Catalunya, under 2017-SGR-1749.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), c/ Jordi Girona Salgado 1-3, 08034, Barcelona, Spain

    Montserrat Estañol, Josep Carmona & Ernest Teniente

  2. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC), av/ Vicuña Mackenna, 4860, Santiago, Chile

    Jorge Munoz-Gama

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  1. Montserrat Estañol
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  2. Jorge Munoz-Gama
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  3. Josep Carmona
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  4. Ernest Teniente
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Correspondence to Montserrat Estañol.

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Communicated by Dr. Ana Moreira.

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Estañol, M., Munoz-Gama, J., Carmona, J. et al. Conformance checking in UML artifact-centric business process models. Softw Syst Model 18, 2531–2555 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-018-0681-6

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