SIMULATIONS TO PREDICT PROCESS MODEL ALIGNMENT WITH STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE

The absence of a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) can lead to many problems in operations within organisations. Process mining techniques can discover process models that reflect the actual behaviour of the process implementations by using event logs extracted from information systems. However, the process models discovered by process mining often have too many variations and deviations when compared to the actual SOPs of the processes. This study attempted to compare three prediction methods in finding a process model from process mining that has the closest properties to the actual SOP. The compared methods are Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC), the four quality dimensions, and similarity measures for structural and behavioural similarities. For the experiment, we designed a synthetic SOP that served as a ground truth for evaluating the performance of the three prediction methods in this study. We used a synthetic event log extracted from a dummy information system we particularly built for this study to test the methods. This study’s results can be useful, e.g. for auditors to save a lot of time from conducting extensive surveys when SOPs are not readily available. (Received in May 2023, accepted in November 2023. This paper was with the authors 2 months for 2 revisions.).