Proactive conformance checking: An approach for predicting deviations in business processes

Modern business processes are subject to an increasing number of external and internal regulations. Compliance with these regulations is crucial for the success of organizations. To ensure this compliance, process managers can identify and mitigate deviations between the predefined process behavior and the executed process instances by means of conformance checking techniques. However, these techniques are inherently reactive, meaning that they can only detect deviations after they have occurred. It would be desirable to detect and mitigate deviations before they occur, enabling managers to proactively ensure compliance of running process instances. In this paper, we propose Business Process Deviation Prediction (BPDP), a novel predictive approach that relies on a supervised machine learning model to predict which deviations can be expected in the future of running process instances. BPDP is able to predict individual deviations as well as deviation patterns. Further, it provides the user with a list of potential reasons for predicted deviations. Our evaluation shows that BPDP outperforms existing methods for deviation prediction. Following the idea of action-oriented process mining, BPDP thus enables process managers to prevent deviations in early stages of running process instances.