After covering control-flow discovery in depth in Part II, this chapter looks at the
situation in which both a process model and an event log are given. The model
may have been constructed by hand or may have been discovered. Moreover, the
model may be normative or descriptive. Conformance checking relates events in the
event log to activities in the process model and compares both. The goal is to find
commonalities and discrepancies between the modeled behavior and the observed
behavior. Conformance checking is relevant for business alignment and auditing.
For example, the event log can be replayed on top of the process model to find
undesirable deviations suggesting fraud or inefficiencies. Moreover, conformance
checking techniques can also be used for measuring the performance of process
discovery algorithms and to repair models that are not aligned well with reality.