Process equivalence in the context of genetic mining
van der W.M.P. Aalst, Ana Karla Alves de Medeiros, A.J.M.M. Weijters · 2006
In various application domains there is a desire to compare models, e.g., to relate an organization-specific model to a reference model, to find a web service matching some desired service description, or to compare some normative model with a model discovered using mining techniques. Although many researchers have worked on different notions of equivalence (e.g., trace equivalence, bisimulation, branching bisimulation, etc.), most of the existing notions are not very useful in this context. First of all, most equivalence notions result in a binary answer (i.e., two processes are equivalent or not). This is not very helpful, because, in real-life applications, one needs to differentiate between slightly different models and completely different models. Second, not all parts of a model are equally important. There may be parts of the model that are rarely activated (i.e., process veins) while other parts are executed for most instances (i.e., the process arteries). Clearly, differences in some veins of a are less important than differences in the main artery of a process. To address the problem, this paper proposes a completely new way of comparing models. Rather than directly comparing two models, the models are compared with respect to some typical behavior. This way, we are able to avoid the two problems just mentioned. The approach has been implemented and has been used in the context of genetic mining. Although the results are presented in the context of Petri nets, the approach can be applied to any modeling language with executable semantics.