Conformance Checking of Services Using the Best Matching Private View

We investigate whether a running implementation of a service conforms to its formal specification in a setting, where only recorded behavior of that implementation is given. Existing conformance checking techniques can be used to measure the degree of conformance of the recorded behavior and its public view but may produce “false negatives”, because a correct implementation (i.e., private view) may deviate significantly from its specification. Many of such deviations are quite harmless. The private view may, for example, reorder some activities without introducing any problems, yet traditional conformance checking would penalize such changes unjustifiably. To overcome this problem, we present a novel approach that determines a best matching private view. We show that among the infinitely many private views, there is a canonical best matching private view. While the represented theory is general and can be applied to arbitrary service models, the implementation is currently limited to acyclic service models.