Conformance Checking for Trace Fragments Using Infix and Postfix Alignments

Conformance checking deals with collating modeled process behavior with observed process behavior recorded in event data. Alignments are a state-of-the-art technique to detect, localize, and quantify deviations in process executions, i.e., traces, compared to reference process models. Alignments, however, assume complete process executions covering the entire process from start to finish or prefixes of process executions. This paper defines infix/postfix alignments, proposes approaches to their computation, and evaluates them using real-life event data.