TY  - JOUR
A1  - Ihde, Sven
A1  - Pufahl, Luise
A1  - Völker, Maximilian
A1  - Goel, Asvin
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - A framework for modeling and executing task
BT  - specific resource allocations in business processes
JF  - Computing : archives for informatics and numerical computation
N2  - As resources are valuable assets, organizations have to decide which resources to allocate to business process tasks in a way that the process is executed not only effectively but also efficiently. Traditional role-based resource allocation leads to effective process executions, since each task is performed by a resource that has the required skills and competencies to do so. However, the resulting allocations are typically not as efficient as they could be, since optimization techniques have yet to find their way in traditional business process management scenarios. On the other hand, operations research provides a rich set of analytical methods for supporting problem-specific decisions on resource allocation. This paper provides a novel framework for creating transparency on existing tasks and resources, supporting individualized allocations for each activity in a process, and the possibility to integrate problem-specific analytical methods of the operations research domain. To validate the framework, the paper reports on the design and prototypical implementation of a software architecture, which extends a traditional process engine with a dedicated resource management component. This component allows us to define specific resource allocation problems at design time, and it also facilitates optimized resource allocation at run time. The framework is evaluated using a real-world parcel delivery process. The evaluation shows that the quality of the allocation results increase significantly with a technique from operations research in contrast to the traditional applied rule-based approach.
KW  - Process Execution
KW  - Business Process Management
KW  - Resource Allocation
KW  - Resource Management
KW  - Activity-oriented Optimization
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-022-01093-2
SN  - 0010-485X
SN  - 1436-5057
VL  - 104
SP  - 2405
EP  - 2429
PB  - Springer
CY  - Wien
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Yousfi, Alaaeddine
A1  - Batoulis, Kimon
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Achieving Business Process Improvement via Ubiquitous Decision-Aware Business Processes
JF  - ACM Transactions on Internet Technology
N2  - Business process improvement is an endless challenge for many organizations. As long as there is a process, it must he improved. Nowadays, improvement initiatives are driven by professionals. This is no longer practical because people cannot perceive the enormous data of current business environments. Here, we introduce ubiquitous decision-aware business processes. They pervade the physical space, analyze the ever-changing environments, and make decisions accordingly. We explain how they can be built and used for improvement. Our approach can be a valuable improvement option to alleviate the workload of participants by helping focus on the crucial rather than the menial tasks.
KW  - Business process improvement
KW  - ubiquitous decision-aware business process
KW  - ubiquitous decisions
KW  - context
KW  - uBPMN
KW  - DMN
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1145/3298986
SN  - 1533-5399
SN  - 1557-6051
VL  - 19
IS  - 1
PB  - Association for Computing Machinery
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Weske, Mathias
A1  - van der Aalst, Wil M. P.
A1  - Verbeek, H. M. W.
T1  - Advances in business process management
Y1  - 2004
SN  - 0169-023X
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Andree, Kerstin
A1  - Ihde, Sven
A1  - Weske, Mathias
A1  - Pufahl, Luise
T1  - An exception handling framework for case management
JF  - Software and Systems Modeling
N2  - In order to achieve their business goals, organizations heavily rely on the operational excellence of their business processes. In traditional scenarios, business processes are usually well-structured, clearly specifying when and how certain tasks have to be executed. Flexible and knowledge-intensive processes are gathering momentum, where a knowledge worker drives the execution of a process case and determines the exact process path at runtime. In the case of an exception, the knowledge worker decides on an appropriate handling. While there is initial work on exception handling in well-structured business processes, exceptions in case management have not been sufficiently researched. This paper proposes an exception handling framework for stage-oriented case management languages, namely Guard Stage Milestone Model, Case Management Model and Notation, and Fragment-based Case Management. The effectiveness of the framework is evaluated with two real-world use cases showing that it covers all relevant exceptions and proposed handling strategies.
KW  - Exception handling
KW  - Knowledge-intensive processes
KW  - Flexible processes;
KW  - Case management
Y1  - 2022
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-022-00993-3
SN  - 1619-1366
SN  - 1619-1374
VL  - 21
IS  - 3
SP  - 939
EP  - 962
PB  - Springer
CY  - Heidelberg
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Meyer, Andreas
A1  - Pufahl, Luise
A1  - Batoulis, Kimon
A1  - Fahland, Dirk
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Automating data exchange in process choreographies
JF  - Information systems
N2  - Communication between organizations is formalized as process choreographies in daily business. While the correct ordering of exchanged messages can be modeled and enacted with current choreography techniques, no approach exists to describe and automate the exchange of data between processes in a choreography using messages. This paper describes an entirely model-driven approach for BPMN introducing a few concepts that suffice to model data retrieval, data transformation, message exchange, and correlation four aspects of data exchange. For automation, this work utilizes a recent concept to enact data dependencies in internal processes. We present a modeling guideline to derive local process models from a given choreography; their operational semantics allows to correctly enact the entire choreography from the derived models only including the exchange of data. Targeting on successful interactions, we discuss means to ensure correct process choreography modeling. Finally, we implemented our approach by extending the camunda BPM platform with our approach and show its feasibility by realizing all service interaction patterns using only model-based concepts. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
KW  - Process modeling
KW  - Data modeling
KW  - Process choreographies
KW  - Data exchange
KW  - BPMN
KW  - SQL
Y1  - 2015
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2015.03.008
SN  - 0306-4379
SN  - 1873-6076
VL  - 53
SP  - 296
EP  - 329
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Pufahl, Luise
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Batch activity: enhancing business process modeling and enactment with batch processing
JF  - Computing
N2  - Organizations strive for efficiency in their business processes by process improvement and automation. Business process management (BPM) supports these efforts by capturing business processes in process models serving as blueprint for a number of process instances. In BPM, process instances are typically considered running independently of each other. However, batch processing-the collectively execution of several instances at specific process activities-is a common phenomenon in operational processes to reduce cost or time. Currently, batch processing is organized manually or hard-coded in software. For allowing stakeholders to explicitly represent their batch configurations in process models and their automatic execution, this paper provides a concept for batch activities and describes the corresponding execution semantics. The batch activity concept is evaluated in a two-step approach: a prototypical implementation in an existing BPM System proves its feasibility. Additionally, batch activities are applied to different use cases in a simulated environment. Its application implies cost-savings when a suitable batch configuration is selected. The batch activity concept contributes to practice by allowing the specification of batch work in process models and their automatic execution, and to research by extending the existing process modeling concepts.
KW  - Batch activity
KW  - Batch processing
KW  - Business process models
KW  - Process Enactment
KW  - Colored Petri Net
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-019-00717-4
SN  - 0010-485X
SN  - 1436-5057
VL  - 101
IS  - 12
SP  - 1909
EP  - 1933
PB  - Springer
CY  - Wien
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Weidlich, Matthias
A1  - Dijkman, Remco
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Behaviour equivalence and compatibility of business process models with complex correspondences
JF  - The computer journal : a publication of the British Computer Society
N2  - Once multiple models of a business process are created for different purposes or to capture different variants, verification of behaviour equivalence or compatibility is needed. Equivalence verification ensures that two business process models specify the same behaviour. Since different process models are likely to differ with respect to their assumed level of abstraction and the actions that they take into account, equivalence notions have to cope with correspondences between sets of actions and actions that exist in one process but not in the other. In this paper, we present notions of equivalence and compatibility that can handle these problems. In essence, we present a notion of equivalence that works on correspondences between sets of actions rather than single actions. We then integrate our equivalence notion with work on behaviour inheritance that copes with actions that exist in one process but not in the other, leading to notions of behaviour compatibility. Compatibility notions verify that two models have the same behaviour with respect to the actions that they have in common. As such, our contribution is a collection of behaviour equivalence and compatibility notions that are applicable in more general settings than existing ones.
KW  - behaviour equivalence
KW  - behaviour compatibility
KW  - model verification
KW  - behavioural models
Y1  - 2012
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxs014
SN  - 0010-4620
SN  - 1460-2067
VL  - 55
IS  - 11
SP  - 1398
EP  - 1418
PB  - Oxford Univ. Press
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Mendling, Jan
A1  - Weber, Ingo
A1  - van der Aalst, Wil
A1  - Brocke, Jan Vom
A1  - Cabanillas, Cristina
A1  - Daniel, Florian
A1  - Debois, Soren
A1  - Di Ciccio, Claudio
A1  - Dumas, Marlon
A1  - Dustdar, Schahram
A1  - Gal, Avigdor
A1  - Garcia-Banuelos, Luciano
A1  - Governatori, Guido
A1  - Hull, Richard
A1  - La Rosa, Marcello
A1  - Leopold, Henrik
A1  - Leymann, Frank
A1  - Recker, Jan
A1  - Reichert, Manfred
A1  - Reijers, Hajo A.
A1  - Rinderle-Ma, Stefanie
A1  - Solti, Andreas
A1  - Rosemann, Michael
A1  - Schulte, Stefan
A1  - Singh, Munindar P.
A1  - Slaats, Tijs
A1  - Staples, Mark
A1  - Weber, Barbara
A1  - Weidlich, Matthias
A1  - Weske, Mathias
A1  - Xu, Xiwei
A1  - Zhu, Liming
T1  - Blockchains for Business Process Management
BT  - Challenges and Opportunities
JF  - ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems
N2  - Blockchain technology offers a sizable promise to rethink the way interorganizational business processes are managed because of its potential to realize execution without a central party serving as a single point of trust (and failure). To stimulate research on this promise and the limits thereof, in this article, we outline the challenges and opportunities of blockchain for business process management (BPM). We first reflect how blockchains could be used in the context of the established BPM lifecycle and second how they might become relevant beyond. We conclude our discourse with a summary of seven research directions for investigating the application of blockchain technology in the context of BPM.
KW  - Blockchain
KW  - business process management
KW  - research challenges
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1145/3183367
SN  - 2158-656X
SN  - 2158-6578
VL  - 9
IS  - 1
SP  - 1
EP  - 16
PB  - Association for Computing Machinery
CY  - New York
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Baier, Thomas
A1  - Mendling, Jan
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Bridging abstraction layers in process mining
JF  - Information systems
N2  - While the maturity of process mining algorithms increases and more process mining tools enter the market, process mining projects still face the problem of different levels of abstraction when comparing events with modeled business activities. Current approaches for event log abstraction try to abstract from the events in an automated way that does not capture the required domain knowledge to fit business activities. This can lead to misinterpretation of discovered process models. We developed an approach that aims to abstract an event log to the same abstraction level that is needed by the business. We use domain knowledge extracted from existing process documentation to semi-automatically match events and activities. Our abstraction approach is able to deal with n:m relations between events and activities and also supports concurrency. We evaluated our approach in two case studies with a German IT outsourcing company. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
KW  - Process mining
KW  - Abstraction
KW  - Event mapping
Y1  - 2014
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2014.04.004
SN  - 0306-4379
SN  - 1873-6076
VL  - 46
SP  - 123
EP  - 139
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Oxford
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Luebbe, Alexander
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Bringing design thinking to business process modeling
Y1  - 2011
SN  - 978-3-642-13756-3
ER  -