Complex Event Processing Methods for Process Querying

Business Process Management targets the design, execution, and optimization of business operations. This includes techniques for process querying, i.e., methods to filter and transform business process representations. Some of these representations may assume the form of event data, with an event denoting an execution of an activity as part of a specific instance of a process. In this chapter, we argue that models and methods developed in the general field of Complex Event Processing (CEP) may be exploited for process querying. Specifically, if event data is generated continuously during process execution, CEP techniques may help to filter and transform process-related information by evaluating queries over event streams. Against this background, this chapter first outlines how CEP fits into common use cases and frameworks for process querying. We then review design choices of CEP models that are of importance when adopting the respective techniques. Finally, we discuss techniques for the application of CEP for process querying, namely those for event–process correlation, model-based query generation, automated discovery of event queries, and diagnostics for event query matches.