Multi-perspective Conformance Checking for Email-Driven Processes

Business process conformance checking determines whether the execution of a process instance aligns with a predefined model that specifies its expected behaviour. Existing approaches are usually tailored for business processes modelled and executed through traditional business process management systems and therefore fall short when the business processes to be checked are described or partially supported by rather unorthodox systems. Such is the case for email-driven processes which are generally business process fragments executed using emailing systems. In fact, one of the main limitations exhibited by existing conformance checking techniques is that they mostly only consider the behavioral, functional, and structural perspectives of a process. In the case of email-driven processes, however, it is crucial to also take into account the contextual perspective of the events obtained from the email bodies and threads. In this paper, we propose an approach for multi-perspective conformance checking of email-driven processes, taking into account both their sequential as well as their contextual perspectives.