Business Process Management Workshops

The keynote overviews the efforts of a group of researchers and practitioners to build and test a theory of business processes (BP) that could be of use for building non-workflow based business processes support (BPS) systems. The background for these efforts lies in two scientific disciplines outside the domain of

Business Process Management

, namely:

Systems Thinking

and

Mathematical System Theory

.

Business Process Management is a prevailing topic that addresses value-added activities in a company. Processes are modeled, realized, executed, and continuously improved. While this approach proves itself appropriate for routine work, it is not applicable for knowledge-intensive processes. Adaptive Case Management (ACM) defines this as knowledge work that is not or is rarely repeated, unable to be foreseen, occurs spontaneously, and depends on context. This paper pinpoints the differences between routine and knowledge work, and introduces ACM as a concept.

MATS is an operational system in use by The Norwegian Food Safety Authority. This paper demonstrates how ACM can support time critical emergency action as well as planned case work, in one unified system. A brief account is given of these two different approaches to ACM, and the interaction between them in MATS, providing a basis for discussion. On the one hand, we have an ACM approach with task support, structured domain data and flexible work support for known bits and pieces of the tasks at hand. On the other hand, we have an extremely flexible ACM approach with functionality to keep control of who is to do what and to document the incident handling. The paper concludes with a discussion on domain specific and domain neutral ACM systems.

Case Management, with its emphasis on the case folder as the anchor for managing business processes, is emerging as a way to provide rich flexibility for knowledge workers while retaining key advantages of BPM systems. This has introduced new challenges in connection with modeling case processes. This short survey traces the history of key modeling ideas and constructs that are being incorporated into the emerging “Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN)” response to the Object Management Group (OMG) request for proposals for a Case Management Process Modeling standard.

Knowledge work is becoming the predominant type of work in developed countries. Leveraging their expertise, skills, and experiences, knowledge workers daily deal with demanding situations. Therefore, they widely work autonomously, but usually collaborate in multiple contexts. Further, their work is influenced by dynamic factors like time constraints, costs, and available resources, and thereby it cannot be pre-specified like routine work. The lack of an appropriate context and process support, in turn, reduces their productivity and hinders the reuse as well as the continuous improvement of elaborated solutions. This paper structures collaborative knowledge work and presents its characteristics and dimensions. Moreover, we introduce a lifecycle methodology to support collaborative knowledge workers holistically.

In hospitals, ward rounds are crucial for decision-making in the context of patient treatment processes. In the course of a ward round, new tasks are defined and allocated to physicians and nurses. In clinical practice, however, these tasks are not systematically managed. During ward rounds, they are jotted down using pen and paper, and their later processing is prone to errors. Furthermore, medical staff must keep track of the processing status of its tasks (e.g., medical orders). To relieve staff members from such a manual task management, the MEDo approach supports ward rounds by transforming the pen and paper worksheet to a mobile user interface on a tablet integrating process support, mobile task management, and access to the electronic patient record. Interviews we conducted have confirmed that medical staff craves for mobile task and process support on wards. Furthermore, in several user experiments, we have proven that MEDo puts task acquisition on a level comparable to that of pen and paper. Overall, with MEDo, physicians can create, monitor and share tasks using a mobile and user-friendly platform.

The role of two-dimensional process graphing in Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is examined. Three design criteria are identified for ACM that were never considered for BPMN. The question for discussion is whether these requirements eliminate all kinds of flow-chart type languages from consideration for use as a process modeling language for users of ACM.

Workflow-based systems dominate the theory and practice of Business Process Management (BPM) leaving little space to other directions, including Adaptive Case Management. While there are reasons for such dominance in today’s enterprise environment, it is time the BPM community studied this dominance in the light of the requirements of the enterprises of the future. This paper analyzes whether workflow-based systems will be able to satisfy business needs in the future based on the assumption that the essential property of the enterprise of the future is agility. The paper identifies properties that a business process should possess in order to be suitable for employing a workflow-based system to support it. Then, it analyzes whether these properties are compatible with the needs of the enterprise of the future and shows why workflow-based systems may become obsolete in the future.

Until recently, efficiency gained through process automation and control was the main preoccupation of BPM practitioners. As a result, the majority of mainstream process modeling standards today is characterized by the imperative modeling style. This style encourages a modeler to commit to a well-determined process execution scenario already at the early design stages. For

case management processes

, however, a strict commitment to a predefined control flow is considered by organizations as a serious handicap. This is the main reason why case management as well as other knowledge-intensive processes in the organizations mostly remain “pen and paper”. In this article we demonstrate how

configurable data objects and context-based configuration rules

can be integrated into a process model in order to improve the process post-design adaptability and to pave the road for case management automated support. These concepts are defined as a part of DeCo (the Declarative Configurable process specification language). DeCo is a declarative modeling approach that is currently under development. We illustrate our results on the example.

Business Process Management (BPM) is used by organizations as a method to increase awareness and knowledge of business processes. Although many companies adopt BPM, there is still a notable insecurity of how to set it up in the most effective way. A considerate amount of research concerning partial aspects of BPM adoption has been done, such as the pitfalls of business process modeling. However, up until now hardly any empirical research has been conducted that aims at validating them. In this paper we address this research gap by conducting eleven in-depth interviews with BPM experts from various companies. We use the Grounded Theory approach to qualitatively analyze the data. Our contribution is twofold. First, we derive a conceptual framework showing the insights of BPM adoption by organizations. Second, we use the evidence from the interviews to discuss the pitfalls of business process modeling and show the countermeasures that are taken by companies.

Redesign projects for business processes usually start with analysing and mapping an actual situation within an organization. This step is called "developing an AS-IS business process model". However, many contemporary organizations have invested in developing and sustaining process models of their existing operations, which are often created by domain experts themselves. In case a new redesign project is to be initiated, a dilemma occurs. Is it safe to use a model from the existing collection or should the AS-IS model be developed all over by a BPM specialist? Clearly, an important consideration here is whether AS-IS models developed by domain experts rather than BPM experts is of sufficient quality to drive a redesign effort. To empirically investigate this issue, we examined a business process within a multinational high-tech organization. Unlike most of the studies focused on one specific aspect of quality (e.g. control flow), we used a framework from the literature that covers three quality aspects. The framework was applied to determine the potential problems in the AS-IS model.

Human resources are actively involved in (BPM), due to their participation in the execution of the work developed within (BP) activities. They, thus, constitute a crucial aspect in BP design. Different approaches have been recently introduced aiming at extending existing BP modelling notations to improve their capabilities for human resource management. However, the scope of the proposals is usually quite limited, and most of them provide ad-hoc solutions for specific scenarios. (RAL) was developed just to overcome such shortcomings, being independent of the modelling notation in which it is used, and providing interesting resource analysis mechanisms. Still, RAL is currently focused on a single BP instance and, thus, resource assignments cannot contain constraints between two process instances. In this paper, we introduce a complete (i.e. syntactical and semantical) extension for RAL to provide it with history-aware expressions. These expressions will, in turn, be able to be automatically resolved and analysed along with the other RAL expressions, thanks to RAL’s semantics based on (DLs).

The behavior of a business process often needs to be constrained according to a given control specification, that comes to cope with new business requirements. Such a control, called supervisory control, is applied to an existing business process specification without having to re-design the running procedures. Hence, there is no need to create a new complete business process model every time the control parameters change. The objective of supervisory control is to limit the behavior of the initial business process to only desired situations. In this paper, a controller synthesis method for business processes is proposed by adapting the supervisory control theory initiated by Ramadge and Wonham. Business process models are specified by using a variant of Workflow nets, which introduces colors in order to represent different process instances and the related data. An algorithm allowing automatic generation of a controller described by a colored Petri net is provided in this paper.

An organization that aligns Knowledge Management (KM) to its business processes is able to identify gaps, to correct mistakes and to keep updated more quickly. The need to identify and represent the dynamic generation and use of existing knowledge embedded into a business process, especially into a Knowledge-Intensive Process (KIP), has proved increasingly relevant. In this context, one important issue is to come up with adequate models and notations to represent KIPs. This paper presents an evaluation of current widely-used modeling languages, such as UML, EPC and BPMN, and also two others specifically proposed to deal with KIPs. The results point out which KIP characteristics could be adequately represented by using notational elements that are inherent to those modeling approaches.

Most organizations have process models describing how cases need to be handled. In fact, legislation and standardization (cf. the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Basel II Accord, and the ISO 9000 family of standards) are forcing organizations to document their processes. These processes are often not enforced by information systems. However, torrents of event data are recorded by today’s information systems. These recorded events reflect how processes are really executed. Often reality deviates from the modeled behavior. Therefore, measuring the extent process executions

conform

to a predefined process model is increasingly important. In this paper, we propose an approach to measure the

precision

of a process model with respect to an event log. Unlike earlier approaches, we first

align

model and log thus making our approach more robust, even in case of deviations. The approach has been implemented in the ProM 6 tool and evaluated using both artificial and real life cases.

Process mining techniques are able to discover process models from event logs but there is a gap between the low-level nature of events and the high-level abstraction of business activities. In this work we present a hierarchical Markov model together with mining techniques to discover the relationship between low-level events and a high-level description of the business process. This can be used to understand how agents perform activities at run-time. In a case study experiment using an agent-based simulation platform (AOR), we show how the proposed approach is able to discover the behaviour of agents in each activity of a business process for which a high-level model is known.

Knowledge of current business processes is a critical requirement for organizational initiatives like compliance management, regulatory reporting, process optimization, reengineering the IT systems and outsourcing. Existing process discovery techniques expect process execution information or event logs while organization’s business processes are often executed on heterogeneous systems across different departments, by integration and data hand-offs between systems. Traditional information systems, however, are designed for storing and processing transaction data which persists in databases and other data storage mechanisms. In this paper we identify the challenges and propose a solution for extracting end-to-end processes from persistent process execution data available in multiple heterogeneous applications. The approach consists of analyzing persistent system data to identify and obtain events in a non-intrusive manner. The approach to get the end-to-end process involves a combination of data and process mining.

In the field of process mining, the use of event logs for the purpose of root cause analysis is increasingly studied. In such an analysis, the availability of attributes/features that may explain the root cause of some phenomena is crucial. Currently, the process of obtaining these attributes from raw event logs is performed more or less on a case-by-case basis: there is still a lack of generalized systematic approach that captures this process. This paper proposes a systematic approach to enrich and transform event logs in order to obtain the required attributes for root cause analysis using classical data mining techniques, the

classification

techniques. This approach is formalized and its applicability has been validated using both self-generated and publicly-available logs.

In the last decade the field of process mining gained attention from research and practice. There is, however, not much known about the use and the appreciation of the involved techniques and tools, many of which are integrated into the well-known ProM framework. Therefore a questionnaire was sent out to ask people’s opinions about process mining and the ProM framework. This paper reports on the answers and tries to link them to existing knowledge from academic literature and popular articles. It must be seen as a first, exploratory attempt to reveal the adoption of process mining and the actual use of the ProM framework.

The process mining field supports the discovery of process models using audit trails logged by information systems. Several mining techniques are able to deal with unstructured processes, mainly through cluster analysis. However, they assume the previous extraction of an event log containing related instances. This task is not trivial when the source system doesn’t provide a reliable separation of its processes and allows the input of data through free text fields. The identification of related instances should, in this case, be explorative and integrated into the process mining tool used in later stages of the analyst’s workflow. To this goal, the MANA approach was developed, allowing the explorative selection and grouping of instances through a canonical database.

In the area of process mining, the ILP Miner is known for the fact that it always returns a Petri net that perfectly fits a given event log. Like for most process discovery algorithms, its complexity is linear in the size of the event log and exponential in the number of event classes (i.e., distinct activities). As a result, the potential gain by partitioning the event classes is much higher than the potential gain by partitioning the traces in the event log over multiple event logs. This paper proposes to use the so-called passages to split up the event classes over multiple event logs, and shows the results are for seven large real-life event logs and one artificial event log: The use of passages indeed alleviates the complexity, but much hinges on the size of the largest passage detected.

Effective risk management is crucial for any organisation. One of its key steps is risk identification, but few tools exist to support this process. Here we present a method for the automatic discovery of a particular type of process-related risk, the danger of deadline transgressions or overruns, based on the analysis of event logs. We define a set of time-related process risk indicators, i.e., patterns observable in event logs that highlight the likelihood of an overrun, and then show how instances of these patterns can be identified automatically using statistical principles. To demonstrate its feasibility, the approach has been implemented as a plug-in module to the process mining framework ProM and tested using an event log from a Dutch financial institution.

In systems where process executions are not strictly enforced by a predefined process model, obtaining reliable performance information is not trivial. In this paper, we analyzed an event log of a real-life process, taken from a Dutch financial institute, using process mining techniques. In particular, we exploited the

alignment

technique [2] to gain insights into the control flow and performance of the process execution. We showed that alignments between event logs and discovered process models from process discovery algorithms reveal insights into frequently occurring deviations and how such insights can be exploited to repair the original process models to better reflect reality. Furthermore, we showed that the alignments can be further exploited to obtain performance information. All analysis in this paper is performed using plug-ins within the open-source process mining toolkit ProM.

A real life event log of the loan and overdraft approvals process from a bank in the Netherlands is analyzed using process mining and other analytical techniques. The log consists of 262,200 events and 13,087 cases. Using a combination of traditional spreadsheet-based approaches, process-mining capabilities available in Disco and exploratory analytics using Classification and Regression Trees (CART). We examined the data in great detail and at multiple levels of granularity. In this report, we present our findings on how we developed a deep understanding of the process using the event log data, assessed potential areas of efficiency improvement within the institution’s operations and identified opportunities to use knowledge gathered during process execution to make predictions about likely eventual outcome of a loan application. We also discuss unique challenges of working with such data, and opportunities for enhancing the impact of such analyses by incorporating additional data elements that should be available internally to the bank.

A real-life event log, taken from a Dutch financial institute, is analyzed using state-of-the-art process mining techniques. The log contains events related to loan/overdraft applications of customers. We propose a hierarchical decomposition of the log into homogenous subsets of cases based on characteristics such as the final decision, offer, and suspicion of fraud. These subsets are used to uncover interesting insights. The event log in its entirety and the homogeneous subsets are analyzed using various process mining techniques. More specifically, we analyze the event log (a) on the resource perspective and the influence of resources on execution/turnaround times of activities, (b) on the control-flow perspective, and (c) for process diagnostics. A dedicated ProM plug-in developed for this challenge allows for a comprehensive analysis of the resource perspective. For the analysis of control-flow and process diagnostics, we use recent, but pre-existing, ProM plug-ins. As the evaluation shows, our mix of techniques is able to uncover many interesting findings and could be used to improve the underlying loan/overdraft application handling process.

We summarise our approach and results of analysing a real-life event log taken from a loan application process in a Dutch financial institute. We mine the control-flow model and analyse different variants of the process statistically and with dotted charts. This allows us to conclude performance properties of the historic execution of the process. Furthermore we examine the resources assigned to different process steps.

Using the Transition System Miner as available in ProM6 [1], we have investigated the control-flow perspective, the data perspective, and the resource perspective of the process that underlies the event log provided for the BPI Challenge 2012 [2].

With the advent of Web 2.0 and online social interactions, people started sharing thoughts, contents and tasks online. This evolved to cover also socialization of task management, which is currently supported by a plethora of online services directed to the final user. However, all these tools share a common weakness: they don’t provide any way for structuring the interactions, dependencies or constraints between tasks. This paper discusses a vision towards the application of BPM techniques and tools to personal task management. The challenge of this roadmap is finding the appropriate level of complexity of processes: the language for modeling such processes should be complete enough for describing basic processes but also simple enough to let people understand, accept and use them in their everyday life. Therefore, our proposal describes how to strip off some of the expressive power of enterprise business processes, so as to accommodate end user needs and acceptance.

Social data are created by the core mechanisms of social software: social production, weak ties and collective decisions. They contain graph-oriented information about content items and their links, relations between people and the statistical information from collective decision mechanisms. Social data can be used to support many business activities. Product innovation, marketing, customer relations can benefit from social data. Products can be improved quicker and more thoroughly as before by analyzing social data. Marketing identifies individual customer requirements from social data. Important events in customer relations can be detected more reliably and earlier if social data are surveyed.

In the enterprise decision making process, specifically product design and CRM, the analysis of all the available and relevant customer information is a major task. In this paper we propose measures based on Formal Concept Analysis to determine conceptual proximity between people. We explain how FCA can support market analysts in their task of CRM marketing and management, with the automatic discovery of knowledge in large amounts of enterprise information (e.g. document collections). The temporal evolution of this proximity measure may be analyzed, and provides significant insights on trends and market behavior. This approach has been exemplified with a case study on Twitter with an emphasis on content dynamics within user communities.

Social networks and crowdsourcing platforms provide powerful means to execute tasks that require human intelligence instead of just machine computation power. Especially crowdsourcing has demonstrated its applicability in many fields, and a variety of platforms have been created for delegating small tasks to human solvers on the Web. However, creating applications that are structured, thus applications that combine more than a single task, is a complex and typically manual endeavor that requires many different interactions with crowdsourcing platforms. In this paper, we introduce the idea of a

crowd computer

, discuss its properties, and propose a programming paradigm for the development of crowdsourcing applications. In particular, we argue in favor of business processes as formalism to program the crowd computer and show how they enable the reuse of intricate crowdsourcing practices.

In modern society, we are frequently required to perform administrative processes to achieve our personal goals. While the last decade has seen many of these individual processes codified via Web sites, there remain significant problems in discovering and integrating the sets of tasks needed to accomplish these personal goals. This paper introduces

Processbook

, a social-network-based framework for managing personal processes.

Processbook

allows users to extract personal process models from online sources, to customise and maintain these models and to share them with other users. It also supports the execution of personal processes, allowing the underlying process model to be adjusted as circumstances change. The paper discusses the rationale for

Processbook

, describes its overall architecture, and defines the structure of process models.

Finding business process models in a model repository is a challenge that needs to be tackled for efficient business process management. Existing process model similarity measures compare models based on named elements and model structure. Social tagging enriches models with so-called tags – words or short phrases describing the content of the model. The tags given to models offer another possibility to judge about the similarity between models. In this paper we compare both approaches based on a study conducted with students. We discuss first insights and perspectives for tag-based search for process models.

Business process modeling using an artifact-centric approach has raised a significant interest over the last few years. This approach is usually stated in terms of the BALSA framework which defines the four “dimensions” of an artifact-centric business process model: Business Artifacts, Lifecycles, Services and Associations. One of the research challenges in this area is looking for different diagrams to represent these dimensions. Bearing this in mind, the present paper shows how all the elements in BALSA can be represented by using the UML language. The advantages of using UML are many. First of all, it is a formal language with a precise semantics. Secondly, it is widely used and understandable by both business people and software developers. And, last but not least, UML allows us to provide an artifact-centric specification for BALSA which incorporates also some aspects of process-awareness.

The representation of many real-world scenarios in conceptual models benefits from the use of multilevel abstraction hierarchies. Product models, for example, are typically grouped into product categories which, in turn, constitute the company’s range of products. Multilevel abstraction hierarchies often reflect the organizational structure of a company and the different information needs of the various departments. Current modeling techniques, however, lack extensive support for the representation of multilevel abstraction hierarchies in business process models. The explicit consideration of multilevel abstraction hierarchies in business process models might improve the alignment of processes across different organizational entities. In this paper, we introduce the concept of the multilevel business artifact (MBA) for representing multilevel abstraction hierarchies of both data and process models. An MBA encapsulates in a single object the data and process models of various levels, thereby expanding consequently the idea of business artifacts to the realm of multilevel abstraction hierarchies.

Process discovery is a technique that allows for automatically discovering a process model from recorded executions of a process as it happens in reality. This technique has successfully been applied for classical processes where one process execution is constituted by a single case with a unique case identifier. Data-centric and artifact-centric systems such as ERP systems violate this assumption. Here a process execution is driven by process data having various notions of interrelated identifiers that distinguish the various interrelated data objects of the process. Classical process mining techniques fail in this setting. This paper presents an automatic technique for discovering for each notion of data object in the process a separate process model that describes the evolution of this object, also known as artifact life-cycle model. Given a relational database that stores process execution information of a data-centric system, the technique extracts event information, case identifiers and their interrelations, discovers the central process data objects and their associated events, and decomposes the data source into multiple logs, each describing the cases of a separate data object. Then classical process discovery techniques can be applied to obtain a process model for each object. The technique is implemented and has been evaluated on the production ERP system of a large retailer.

Enabling process flexibility is crucial for any process-aware information system (PAIS). In particular, implemented processes may have to be frequently adapted to accommodate to changing environments and evolving needs. When evolving a PAIS, corresponding process schemas have to be changed in a controlled manner. In the context of object-aware processes, which are characterized by a tight integration of process and data, PAIS evolution not only requires process schema evolution, but the evolution of data and user authorization schemas as well. Since the different schemas of an object-aware PAIS are tightly integrated, modifying one of them usually requires concomitant changes of the other schemas. This paper presents a framework for object-aware process support and discusses major requirements and challenges for enabling schema evolution in object-aware PAIS.

Artifact-centric modeling is an approach for modeling business processes based on business artifacts, i.e., entities that are central for the company’s operations. Existing process mining methods usually focus on traditional process-centric rather than artifact-centric models. Furthermore, currently no methods exist for discovering models in Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM) notation from event logs. To bridge this gap, we propose a method for translating Petri Net models into GSM which gives the possibility to use the numerous existing algorithms for mining Petri Nets for discovering the life cycles of single artifacts and then generating GSM models.

We consider the problem of analyzing specifications of data-centric services. Specifications of such services incorporate data in business protocols. We focus our study on the decidability of the problem of checking the simulation preorder in the framework of the Colombo model. Colombo is a data-centric service that appears, at a first glance, to have a limited expressivity. Our first result, presented in this paper, shows that even in this restricted framework, both simulation and state reachability problems are already undecidable. Even worse, these problems remain undecidable in the case of non-communicating, read-only services.

In this article we describe how Complex Event Processing (CEP) can be smoothly integrated into Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM). This approach is grounded on communication patterns between acting systems (i.e. subjects), such as people and software systems. The integration is done twofold. Firstly, complex event processing units can be seen as one way to instantiate a process. Secondly, CEP units can be integrated into subjects as internal functions. Based on evaluating various data patterns the subject containing the CEP function can inform other subjects by sending corresponding messages. In this way, nondeterministic (since not predictable) events can be dealt with at runtime. An informed subject may actively influence further system behavior by delegating further observation tasks to the subject containing the complex event processing unit. Based on the introduced concepts and their straightforward implementation actual business operations can not only be represented, but also processed more accurately.

Today event-driven business process management has matured from a scientific vision to a realizable methodology for companies of all sizes and shapes. However, leveraging the power of complex event processing for supporting business process monitoring is cumbersome because of the complicated modeling of rules and alerts as well as key performance indicators in machine readable format using the event languages. However, using a model-driven approach for generating a monitoring infrastructure based on events like the aPro architecture is one possibility to enable companies with various infrastructures to leverage the advantages of business process monitoring. This paper describes how KPIs are modeled and transferred into event rules by a model-driven approach.

Scientific workflows streamline large-scale, complex scientific processes and enable different parts of a process to be systematically and efficiently executed on distributed resources. In this paper, we propose an event-driven framework for scientific workflows, which goes beyond the typical paradigm of global ECA (Event-Condition-Action) rules and executes scientific processes in terms of event message-driven conversations between rule agents. The behavioral reaction logic implemented by messaging reaction rules in combination with derivation rules used to represent complicated scientific conditional logic provides a highly expressive, scalable and flexible way to define complex scientific workflow patterns. Finally, a prototype system based on a Web rule engine Prova and a tool for rule-based collaboration Rule Responder is demonstrated.

Modern organizations need real-time awareness about the current business conditions and the various events that occur from multiple and heterogeneous environments and influence their business operations. Moreover, based on real-time awareness they need a mechanism that allows them to respond quickly to the changing business conditions, in order to either avoid problematic situations or exploit opportunities that may arise in their business environment. In this paper we present an event-driven system that enables awareness about the situations happening in business environments and increases organizations’ responsiveness to them. We illustrate how the proposed system increases the awareness of stakeholders about the running business processes, as well as their flexibility by presenting a practical application of the system in the logistics domain.

To address the issue of business process adaptation, we focus on handling adaptation needs as cross-cutting concerns because they rely or must affect many parts of a business process. Our research objective is to enhance aspect-oriented business process management with event-driven capabilities for discovering situations requiring adaptations. To this end, we develop an aspect-oriented extension to BPMN2.0 and we couple it with an event-driven approach for detecting and reasoning about situations that require adaptation of business processes. We use event processing in order to monitor the process execution environment and, when execution violates some quality “threshold” or a problem arises, to detect it and trigger lookup for a suitable process adaptation, using a reasoning mechanism. We demonstrate that our approach is able to address simultaneously adaptation on process model and execution level.

Business process management (BPM) systems are implemented by organizations in order to gain a full control of processes and ensure their efficient and effective performance according to specified procedures. However, a common phenomenon found in organizations is that processes are bypassed and worked around by their participants. The premise underlying this paper is that workarounds are performed for reasons. Understanding these reasons may reveal flaws in process design or in the implementation of BPM systems. The paper reports an exploratory multiple-case study, performed in three organizations, intended to gain an understanding of business process workarounds and the situations in which they are performed. The study identified six workaround types and 24 situational factors related to them.

Research on quality issues of business process models has recently begun to explore the process of creating process models by analyzing the modeler’s interactions with the modeling environment. In this paper we aim to complement previous insights on the modeler’s modeling behavior with data gathered by tracking the modeler’s eye movements when engaged in the act of modeling. We present preliminary results and outline directions for future research to triangulate toward a more comprehensive understanding of the process of process modeling. We believe that combining different views on the process of process modeling constitutes another building block in understanding this process that will ultimately enable us to support modelers in creating better process models.

Under the competitive environment, innovation becomes a destination of many companies. Business process orientation (BPO) represents “a state of mind” of organizations to rethink and redesign the business. This study considers BPO can get the “innovation” ball rolling within organizations through fostering an organizational flow of information and communication. Results from a survey of Japanese companies designate that BPO improves cross-functional integration and customer orientation, which, in turn, motivate employees to innovate. This paper contributes to research by proposing a path model from BPO to employees’ innovativeness, which empirically substantiates the effectiveness of business process management towards innovation. The findings suggest managers to cultivate BPO as a key organizational resource and support the process-based interaction internally and externally.

Managing large collections of different process model versions is for many organizations inevitable and results from, e.g., adaption of models to solve different challenges or modifications due to changed or new conditions. One challenge in this context is to make the differences between the versions visible and comparable. Visualizations have the advantage that they can present the relationships between the different process versions in a user-friendly way and therefore support users in their decisions. In this paper we introduce a visualization concept with the goal to provide a simple overview in order to compare complementary or contrasting characteristics between different versions. The design idea is presented on the basis of two use cases. Limitations of the concept are also discussed. The visualization concept should support users to gain a first impression about the characteristics between the versions and can be used as an entry point for a more detailed analysis of the different versions.

The increasing adoption of process-aware information systems and the high variability of business processes in practice have resulted in process model repositories with large collections of related process variants (i.e., process families). Existing approaches for variability management focus on the modeling and configuration of process variants. However, case studies have shown that run-time configuration and re-configuration as well as the evolution of process variants are essential as well. Effectively handling process variants in these lifecycle phases requires deferring certain configuration decisions to the run-time, dynamically re-configuring process variants in response to contextual changes, adapting process variants to emerging needs, and evolving process families over time. In this paper, we characterize these flexibility needs for process families, discuss fundamental challenges to be tackled, and provide an overview of existing proposals made in this context.

Pattern detection serves different purposes in managing large collections of process models, ranging from syntax checking to compliance validation. This paper presents a runtime analysis of four graph-theoretical algorithms for (frequent) pattern detection. We apply these algorithms to large collections of process and data models to demonstrate that, despite their theoretical intractability, they are able to return results within (milli-) seconds. We discuss the relative performance of these algorithms and their applicability in practice.

This paper presents a model for organizing and assessing business process documentation with the aim of identifying gaps and inconsistencies. The proposed model – namely the Process Documentation Cube (PDC) – has been tested in six public sector organizations in Estonia – three of them with years of process modeling engagement and three others in early stages of process modeling adoption. In the organizations where process modeling is already well established, the PDC allowed the relevant stakeholders to identify gaps in their documentation and directions for improving the integration between process models and other documentation. In the remaining organizations, the PDC was perceived as a useful tool for planning process documentation efforts.

The capacity of a composite service to change configuration according to the component services behavior is essential. In particular, this reconfiguration should be done dynamically without disturbing the service execution. To the best of our knowledge, few works were interested in verifying the coherence of this dynamic reconfiguration. By dynamic reconfiguration we mean for example, overcome the failure or the unavailability of a service component by the discovery and the replacement of another service that provides the same functionalities. To do so, we propose an approach based on Event-B for a formal verification of the structural and behavioral properties of the component service before dynamically integrated into the composition during the execution. A logistics-based process is used as use case in order to validate our approach.

Even though the concept of capability is an important element in service oriented architectures and enterprise information systems, little effort has been put towards modelling it as a first class citizen. Major related contributions were part of other efforts such as modelling business processes, service description and search requests. Current approaches either confuse capabilities with invocation interfaces, do not go beyond the classical IOPEs paradigm, or classify them into categories. Most of these approaches do not allow to determine intuitively what the exact capability is as well as they do not describe it with proper business features. In our work, we are interested in modelling and managing capabilities as stand alone entities, presented via an action verb and a set of domain related attributes/features. Presenting capabilities as such allows us to represent them at different levels of abstraction and make explicit links between them. In this paper, we highlight the benefits of our model and we build on top of it a set of requirements that allow end users to generate more custom capabilities. In order to illustrate our conceptual model benefits, we apply it in describing logistics capabilities.

In Modeling Multi agent systems (MAS), the mobility of agent is a basic issue to express interactions of flow actions, consequently, modelling migration process is a crucial issue. In this paper, we integrate the Ferber and Müller’s Influence/Reaction model in Agent Petri Nets (APN) to model migration mobile agents. This model clarifies the migration process of agent from an environment to another and enhances its capacity for formal verification.

This paper presents a novel approach to carbon credit trading with pervasive computing technologies, particularly RFID (or barcode) technology. It introduces RFID tags as certificates for the rights to claim carbon credits in carbon offsetting and trading. It enables buyers, including end-consumers, that buy products with carbon credits to hold and claim these credits unlike existing carbon offsetting schemes. It also supports the simple intuitive trading of carbon credits by trading RFID tags coupled to the credits. The approach was constructed and evaluated with real customers and real carbon credits in a real supply chain. It can also be used to encourage industries and homes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Today logistic systems are business document based, e.g. processing ship manifest, load lists, declarations, and shipping instructions. Business processes are organized in handling these business documents in the context of framework contracts with business partners. Implementations of new requirements like the Entry Summary Declaration 24 hours before the goods are actually loaded on a vessel are therefore difficult to implement in those systems. Furthermore, these systems have difficulties in configuring business processes in a dynamic environment in which processes are configured for one specific business transaction. This paper proposes a high level logistic process modeling environment supporting logistic services according the business document choreography defined for these services.

The increasing adoption of Process-Aware Information Systems, together with the

reuse

of process knowledge, has led to the emergence of process model repositories with large process families, i.e., collections of related process model variants. For managing such related model collections two types of approaches exist. While

behavioral

approaches take supersets of variants and derive a process variant by hiding and blocking process elements,

structural

approaches take a base process model as input and derive a process variant by applying a set of change operations to it. However, at the current stage no framework for assessing these approaches exists and it is not yet clear which approach should be better used and under which circumstances. Therefore, to give first insights about this issue, this work compares both approaches in terms of understandability of the produced process model artifacts, which is fundamental for the management of process families and the

reuse

of their contained process fragments. In addition, the comparison can serve as theoretical basis for conducting experiments as well as for fostering the development of tools managing business process variability.

Business process modeling is essential in any process improvement project. Yet, it is a time consuming and an error-prone step. With a rapidly increasing number of process models developed by different process designers, it becomes crucial for business process designers to reuse knowledge existing in model repositories, e.g., to find solutions for a recurring situation. Process model querying provides powerful means to address this situation. However, current approaches fail if no single process model satisfies all constraints of a query.

In this paper, we present a novel approach for querying business process models repositories, where a query is decomposed into several subqueries. Each subquery is then used to obtain matching fragments from process models stored in the repository. New process models are constructed from these fragments, which may originate from different process models. By this, several processes are assembled from matching fragments and presented to the process designer as a ranked list. The main advantage of our approach is that the designer does not need to specify the subqueries, as they are derived automatically.

Many companies use business process modeling to support various improvements initiatives leading to an increasing number of process models. Typically, these models are stored in a collection containing several hundreds of process models. In many cases, process models are overlapping, although parts could be easily reused saving costs and efforts. Different labeling styles and evolving process models complicate the detection of reusable model parts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for the detection of equivalent and similar process model parts that exploits semantic comparison of activity labels and behavioral comparison of control flow. We evaluate our approach on the SAP Reference Model, a collection with 604 process models. The evaluation reveals insights for the thresholds of semantic and behavioral similarity of process models as well as their influence for similar process part detection. Hence, we identify five candidate groups with specific similarity properties that contain reoccurring process parts.

Reference modeling research aims at offering exemplary process models, that support business decision makers during the implementation of new or the improvement of existing business processes. The idea of service blueprints is to map the idea of reference modeling onto service processes or business processes with significant service elements. The paper at hand introduces an inductive seven-step method for the creation of service blueprints. By the use of techniques like single-entry single-exit regions in process graphs, we simplify clear partitioning of the business processes into potential service blueprints. To further examine the practical usability of the method we document the usage of the seven-step method in a practical use case that is part of a project work. The result is a set of service blueprints that are derived from prior inquired process models and detailed insights concerning the usability of the proposed method.

A business process model should be explained to the business stakeholders to validate that it is a correct representation of targeted information of a particular domain. A business process model is typically represented by using a graphical notation such as Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). A graphical representation of a business process model can be complex to understand for the business stakeholders. However, a business rule represented in a natural language can be easy to understand for a novel person. Moreover, the extracted business rules can be employed for reuse of information through mapping to other standards such as BPEL, OCL, etc. In this paper, we present a novel approach to automatically generate natural language representation of business process models explained in BPMN. The presented approach employs SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules) as an intermediate representation to generate natural language expressions those are easy to understand for business stake holders.

The project

RecSeq – Requirements for Security

(2008-2012) developed and evaluated techniques that can be used visualise security and other dependability concerns, such as safety, early in the planning of new information systems. A central concern was to allow inclusion of a variety of stakeholders, in particular non-ICT/non-security experts, in the requirements process. This paper reviews the dependability requirements work done in the ReqSec project and highlights its relevance for the dependability of business processes.

Estonia has implemented a specific form of electronic voting – internet voting – as a method to participate in various types of legally binding elections since 2005. The mitigation of security risks in the method has lead to changes in the voting procedures. Those changes might affect the way we think about traditional voting.

Effectively protecting information systems is a pivotal responsibility of (IT) management, which faces many challenges: technological complexities, business complexities, various stakeholders and conflicting requirements. Yet, there is no holistic modelling approach that comprehensively addresses all these challenges, while accounting for technical, organizational and business aspects. This paper analyzes the requirements of such a comprehensive modelling method for IT security design and management. We argue that enterprise modelling is most suitable to serve as a foundation for such an approach. We apply a method for developing domain specific modelling languages (DSML) that is chiefly based on a structured analysis of use scenarios including prototypical diagrams. It is supplemented by requirements found in literature. Our analysis results in 23 requirements that should be satisfied by the targeted modelling method. These results are intended to serve as a foundation for discussion and discursive evaluation by peers and domain experts.

Businesses require the ability to rapidly implement new processes and to quickly adapt existing ones to environmental changes including the optimization of their interactions with partners and customers. However, changes of either intra- or cross-organizational processes must not be done in an uncontrolled manner. In particular, processes are increasingly subject to compliance rules that usually stem from security constraints, corporate guidelines, standards, and laws. These compliance rules have to be considered when modeling business processes and changing existing ones. While change and compliance have been extensively discussed for intra-organizational business processes, albeit only in an isolated manner, their combination in the context of cross-organizational processes remains an open issue. In this paper, we discuss requirements and challenges to be tackled in order to ensure that changes of cross-organizational business processes preserve compliance with imposed regulations, standards and laws.

Today’s businesses are inherently process-driven. Conseque- ntly, the use of business-process driven systems, usually implemented on top of

service-oriented

or

cloud-based

infrastructures, is increasing. At the same time, the demand on the security, privacy, and compliance of such systems is increasing as well. As a result, the costs—with respect to computational effort at runtime as well as financial costs—for operating business-process driven systems increase steadily.

In this paper, we present a method for statically checking the security and conformance of the system implementation, e.g., on the source code level, to requirements specified on the business process level. As the compliance is statically guaranteed—already at design-time—this method reduces the number of run-time checks for ensuring the security and compliance and, thus, improves the runtime performances. Moreover, it reduces the costs of system audits, as there is no need for analyzing the generated log files for validating the compliance to the properties that are already statically guaranteed.

One driver of business process management is the opportunity to reduce costs by outsourcing certain tasks to third-party organizations. At the same time, it is undesirable that delicate information (e.,g., trade secrets) “leak” to the involved third parties, be it for legal or economic reasons. The absence of such leaks — called

noninterference

— can be checked automatically. Such a check requires an assignment of each task of the business process as either confidential or public. Drawbacks of this method are that (1) this assignment of every task is cumbersome, (2) an unsuccessful check requires a corrected confidentiality assignment although (3) the diagnosis and correction of information leaks is a nontrivial task. This paper presents a modeling prototype that integrates the noninterference check into the early design phase of an interorganizational business process. It not only allows for instant feedback on confidentiality assignments, but also for an automated completion of partial assignments toward guaranteed noninterference.

Security has turn out to be a necessity of information systems (ISs) and information

per se

. Nevertheless, existing practices report on numerous cases when security aspects were considered only at the end of the development process, thus, missing the systematic security analysis. Misuse case diagrams help identify security concerns at early stages of the IS development. Despite this fundamental advantage, misuse cases tend to be rather imprecise; they do not comply with security risk management strategies, and, thus, could lead to misinterpretation of the security-related concepts. Such limitations could potentially result in poor security solutions. This paper applies a systematic approach to understand how misuse case diagrams could help model organisational assets, potential risks, and security countermeasures to mitigate these risks. The contribution helps understand how misuse cases could deal with security risk management and support reasoning for security requirements and their implementation in the software system.

Process deviation analysis is becoming increasingly important for companies. This paper presents a framework which structures the field of process deviation analysis and identifies new research opportunities. Application of the framework starts from managerial questions which relate to specific deviation categories and methodological steps. Finally a general outline to detect high-level process deviations is formulated.

This paper proposes an architectural solution that allows organizations to rely on cloud-based services to securely operate their business processes. The solution is built upon a thick client and thin server architectural pattern, where security constructs such as public-key and symmetric cryptographic systems are used to maintain confidentiality between the participants while keeping the server unaware of their participations and business process instances.

This paper presents Secure Enhanced Web Session providing an advanced protection of the Web sessions required in the Workflow environments. SEWebSession provides mandatory access control to the session state since the proposed policy is outside the scope of the Workflow developers and participants. Our MAC approach authorises various confidentiality and integrity properties for the session state. SEWebSession controls a session state whether it is maintained in the memory of the Web server, a dedicated server or a SQL Database. The protection rules can be reused from one platform to another one. SEWebSession has been successfully integrated within an industrial Workflow environment running on Windows platforms. The experimentations show the efficiency of SEWebSession for protecting Microsoft Windows/IIS platforms. However, SEWebSession can be easily ported within Linux/ Apache platforms.

Role-based access control (RBAC) is commonly used to implement authorization procedures in Process-aware information systems (PAIS). Process mining refers to a bundle of algorithms that typically discover process models from event log data produced during the execution of real-world processes. Beyond pure control flow mining, some techniques focus on the discovery of organizational information from event logs. However, a systematic analysis and comparison of these approaches with respect to their suitability for mining RBAC models is still missing. This paper works towards filling this gap and provides a first guidance for applying mining techniques for deriving RBAC models.

Large process models may comprise hundreds or thousands of process elements, like activities, gateways, and data objects. Presenting such process models to users and enabling them to interact with these models constitute crucial tasks of any process-aware information systems (PAISs). Existing PAISs, however, neither provide adequate techniques for visualizing and abstracting process models nor for interacting with them. In particular, PAISs do not provide tailored process visualizations as needed in complex application environments. This paper presents examples of large process models and discusses some of the challenges to be tackled when visualizing and abstracting respective models. Further, it presents a comprehensive framework that allows for personalized process model visualizations, which can be tailored to the specific needs of the different user groups. First, process model complexity can be reduced by abstracting the models, i.e., by eliminating or aggregating process elements not relevant in the given visualization context. Second, the appearance of process elements can be customized independent of the process modeling language used. Third, different visualization formats (e.g., process diagrams, process forms, and process trees) are supported. Finally, it will be discussed how tailored visualizations of process models may serve as basis for changing and evolving process models at a high level of abstraction.

In this tool report, we present an approach to inspect and present business process models in

3D

. We show our interactive

3D

-software

Flight Navigator

. Flight Navigator supports numerous interaction paradigms that enable the user to easily present, inspect and analyse a process model in a

3D

-environment. A major feature, that is part of our contribution, is the support of interactively browsing through a process (performing ’flights’). The tool provides navigational help for the user by displaying possible directions for further browsing using a head-up-display (HUD). The goal of Flight Navigator is to present, inspect and analyse business process models exploiting

3D

-navigation features. At the same time, the tool is aiming to provide ease of use without cognitively overburdening the user faced with a

3D

-environment.

In the quest for knowledge about how to make good process models, recent research focus is shifting from studying the quality of process models to studying the process of process modeling (often abbreviated as

PPM

) itself. This paper reports on our efforts to visualize this specific process in such a way that relevant characteristics of the modeling process can be observed graphically. By recording each modeling operation in a modeling process, one can build an event log that can be used as input for the

PPMChart Analysis

plug-in we implemented in ProM. The graphical representation this plug-in generates allows for the discovery of different patterns of the process of process modeling. It also provides different views on the process of process modeling (by configuring and filtering the charts).

Understanding the activities in large-scale organizations such as big companies is very important. A challenge in the information visualization field is how to combine a representation of the global structure of an organization with representations of each activity. We developed a representation technique to provide a panoramic view of such activities. The representation embeds charts expressing activities into cells of a treemap. By using this representation, both quantitative and temporal aspects of activities can be seen simultaneously. We also developed an analysis tool called “Series at a Glance,” which provides functions to manipulate the representation. The tool helps in the analysis of tens of thousands of activities by providing useful visual information.

Clinical practice guidelines are documents that include recommendations describing appropriate care for the management of patients with a specific clinical condition, such as diabetes or chronic heart failure. Several representation languages exist to model these documents in a computer-interpretable and -executable form with the intention of integrating them into clinical information systems.

Asbru

is one of these representation languages that is able to model the complex hierarchies of these medical processes (called

plans

in Asbru). To allow their efficient evaluation and manipulation, they must be visualized in a compact and still clear form. This visualization must be integrated into an editing environment which makes changes to the process hierarchy easy and gives immediate feedback on the changes.

In this paper, we present a novel visualization, Plan Strips, which represents the hierarchy of plans, i.e., processes, as a set of nested strips. It represents the synchronization of the plans by colour-coding the strips and by the ordering of the strips. This saves considerable space compared to graph representations. The visualization is integrated into an editing environment which allows the immediate modification of the plan hierarchy, but also changes to all other aspects of the plan.