Julian Schnitzler wins the prize for the best Bachelor CS thesis award at RWTH

The thesis “Alignment Approximation using Subsets of Modeled Behavior” by Julian Schnitzler was selected as the best Bachelor thesis in Computer Science at RWTH.

This was announced during the annual “Sommerfest der Informatik” on June 25, 2021. The thesis presents important results in alignment approximation. Computing alignments is a common approach to compare a log trace and a model. As the calculation of alignments can be time consuming, various approximation techniques exist. Recently, edit-distance based techniques were introduced. While these techniques approximate the alignment cost, they do not provide actual alignments. Multiple approaches exist that take traces generated from a model, and compare one or multiple model traces to a log trace. In his thesis, Julian Schnitzler proposes a method to compare multiple model traces at the same time to a log trace to receive an alignment approximation. He also shows that compression techniques can be used to improve the approach in terms of runtime and evaluated the work using several real-life event logs.

The figure above, taken from the thesis, shows an example synchronous trace product net with prefix and suffix optimization between a trace net and a multi model trace net.

The prize includes a €500 award. For more information on the work Julian Schnitzler click here.