Trends in BPM Research (Sommersemester 2017)

Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Mathias Weske (Business Process Technology) , Dr. Luise Pufahl (Gastdozenten oder Dozenten der Uni-Potsdam)

General Information

• Weekly Hours: 2
• Credits: 3
• Graded: yes
• Enrolment Deadline: 28.04.2017
• Teaching Form: Lecture
• Enrolment Type: Compulsory Elective Module

Programs, Module Groups & Modules

Description

Business process modeling (BPM) is a well-established method in industry to capture business processes of an organization for documentation, implementation, monitoring and improvement purposes. In our group, we develop methods, concepts and tools to support and improve this area, e.g. by integrating batch processing into business processes. Further, we look into related research areas (see the figure below) and investigate in how far business process modeling can benefit from other research.

In this course, we want to present you current research trends in BPM and want to give you insights into the work of researchers. You will get to know techniques for approaching research topics. This can give you support in defining own research topics, e.g. for your master thesis.

The following figure illustrates the discussed topics of our course.

(1) Business Process Models and Data: Data is a central concept in business process management. Process-related information, is continuously generated, consumed, and manipulated by processes, it evolves during execution, and it is used for quality assessment and process re-engineering. Several efforts following either activity-centric or artifact-centric approaches have aimed at solving the dichotomy of processes and data. However, despite the abundance of modeling languages and methods, data remain hidden within IT systems and a well-founded (conceptual) framework for integrating processes and data has not yet been proposed.

(2) Batch Processing in Business Processes: In existing business process models, it is assumed that the executions of a process model, i.e. the process instances, run totally independently from each other. However, in certain situations a synchronized execution of a group of process instances, called batch execution, can improve the process performance. For example, if an online retailer receives two orders from one customer, there is a chance that they can be packed and shipped together to save shipment costs. In the first part of the lecture, we will have a look into approaches to realize batch processing in business processes, especially at an approach developed by the BPT group integrating batch activities in process models.

(3) Process Models and Decision Models: A company's value chain is directly affected by how well it designs and coordinates enterprise decision making. Therefore, we present decision modeling complementary to business process modeling. Coupling the two disciplines comes with various challenges. For instance, the interplay of decisions and processes must be consistent. Hence, we will introduce a set of consistency criteria and different methods for checking them.

Further, mining techniques can be employed to improve decision making during process execution by discovering decision rules. Typical decision rules are built on top of Boolean algebra. Since the real world is imprecise, we incorporate fuzziness into decision models by utilizing fuzzy decision rules and extend the mining approach accordingly.

(4) Fragment-based Case Handling & Relevance of Adaptive Processes to Logistics: One of the main drivers in BPM research is to increase the flexibility of the processes that can be modeled and supported by process management systems. Case Management is one recent example which aims at supporting knowledge work, in which the course of the case evolves during its execution, depending on data objects and user decisions. In this part of the lecture you will encounter the case management model and notation (CMMN) standard, artifact-centric process modeling approaches, and declarative process modeling. This will culminate in the hybrid approach of dynamically combined process fragments that was developed at our group and implemented during the last bachelor project as Chimera framework.

Logistics is an exciting application field that currently undergoes a significant change under the influence of the digital transformation of enterprises. Some novel business models  in logistics, like last-mile delivery and crowd shipping, require highly flexible IT systems in order to be realized. In this lecture the concepts of adaptive processes/orchestrations and adaptive choreographies will be discussed and their relevance for the logistics highlighted.

(5) Use Events to Implement Business Processes: Business processes today are often run in a distributed environment with several participants. Events are a form of message/signal exchanges between the partners. Also, processes can receive events from external sources like a sensor or a traffic API. The information carried by the events are then used to improve the flexibility or decision making of the process. An event processing platform connects to different event sources, operates on event streams and notifies the event consumers about specific event occurrences. However, there are various aspects to consider while using events in business processes, for example, event binding, event subscription, event correlation or event timestamps. This part of the lecture will focus on such issues and the current state of research in the area of complex event processing.

(6) Choreographies and their RESTful Implementation: Today, business process management is a key approach to organize work, and many companies represent their operations in business process models. Recently, choreography diagrams were introduced to represent interactions between business processes, run by different partners. While there is considerable work on using process models during process implementation, there is little work on using choreography models to implement interactions. In this part of the lecture, we focus on a novel approach to enhance choreography diagrams by execution information. The approach is based on the REST architecture style. This is the primary way for communication between interacting systems.

Requirements

No requirements for this lecture. The bachelor lecture POIS is helpful for the lecture.

Literature

Mathias Weske: Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012, 2007.

More literature will be published during the course of the lecture.

Learning

This lecture will be held by the PhD students of our chair. Each PhD student will cover one to two lecture appointments.

Examination

The final exam will be a written exam.

Dates

19.04    Overview of lecture and Intro into BPM  (Luise Pufahl)

26.04    Process Models and Data (Francesca Zerbato)

03.05    Batch Processing in Business Processes (Luise Pufahl)

10.05    Process Models and Decision Models - Intro (Ekaterina Bazhenova)

17.05    Process Models and Decision Models - Decision Mining (Ekaterina Bazhenova)

24.05    Process Models and Decision Models - Decision Tables (Kimon Batoulis)

31.05    Process Models and Decision Models - Soundness Analysis (Kimon Batoulis)

07.06    Fragment-based Case Handling (Marcin Hewelt)

14.06    Fragment-based Case Handling (Marcin Hewelt)

21.06    Relevance of Adaptive Processes to Logistics (Prof. Dr. Dimka Karastoyanova)

28.06    Use Events to Implement Business Processes (Sankalita Mandal)

05.07    Use Events to Implement Business Processes (Sankalita Mandal)

12.07    Choreographies and their Restful Implementation (Adriatik Nikaj)

19.07    Choreographies and their Restful Implementation (Adriatik Nikaj)

26.07    Summary  (Luise Pufahl)

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