Observation and mitigation of causal re-ordering in distributed business process logs

Cloud computing provides enhanced collaboration opportunities, but auditing business activities in workflows has become more difficult in a distributed, cloud-based system. The fundamental issue stems from timestamp inaccuracy in event logs. Tools that analyze logs for causal relationships are ineffective, yielding products that can neither capture invariant execution, nor perform conformance checking to check workflow health. Therefore, we offer the Flower Chain Net (FCN), a new Petri net that reduces concurrency and improves conformance checking. To build FCN, we provide the Flower Chain Discovery Algorithm. FCN is evaluated for structural expressiveness, efficiency, and behavioral analysis traits against widely employed methods.