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  - Di Ciccio, Claudio
A1  - Mendling, Jan
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Matching events and activities by integrating behavioral aspects and label analysis
JF  - Software and systems modeling
N2  - Nowadays, business processes are increasingly supported by IT services that produce massive amounts of event data during the execution of a process. These event data can be used to analyze the process using process mining techniques to discover the real process, measure conformance to a given process model, or to enhance existing models with performance information. Mapping the produced events to activities of a given process model is essential for conformance checking, annotation and understanding of process mining results. In order to accomplish this mapping with low manual effort, we developed a semi-automatic approach that maps events to activities using insights from behavioral analysis and label analysis. The approach extracts Declare constraints from both the log and the model to build matching constraints to efficiently reduce the number of possible mappings. These mappings are further reduced using techniques from natural language processing, which allow for a matching based on labels and external knowledge sources. The evaluation with synthetic and real-life data demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach and its robustness toward non-conforming execution logs.
KW  - Process mining
KW  - Event mapping
KW  - Business process intelligence
KW  - Constraint satisfaction
KW  - Declare
KW  - Natural language processing
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-017-0603-z
SN  - 1619-1366
SN  - 1619-1374
VL  - 17
IS  - 2
SP  - 573
EP  - 598
PB  - Springer
CY  - Heidelberg
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Nikaj, Adriatik
A1  - Weske, Mathias
A1  - Mendling, Jan
T1  - Semi-automatic derivation of RESTful choreographies from business process choreographies
JF  - Software and systems modeling
N2  - Enterprises reach out for collaborations with other organizations in order to offer complex products and services to the market. Such collaboration and coordination between different organizations, for a good share, is facilitated by information technology. The BPMN process choreography is a modeling language for specifying the exchange of information and services between different organizations at the business level. Recently, there is a surging use of the REST architectural style for the provisioning of services on the web, but few systematic engineering approach to design their collaboration. In this paper, we address this gap in a comprehensive way by defining a semi-automatic method for the derivation of RESTful choreographies from process choreographies. The method is based on natural language analysis techniques to derive interactions from the textual information in process choreographies. The proposed method is evaluated in terms of effectiveness resulting in the intervention of a web engineer in only about 10% of all generated RESTful interactions.
KW  - Business process choreographies
KW  - RESTful choreographies
KW  - Natural language analysis
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-017-0653-2
SN  - 1619-1366
SN  - 1619-1374
VL  - 18
IS  - 2
SP  - 1195
EP  - 1208
PB  - Springer
CY  - Heidelberg
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Leopold, Henrik
A1  - Mendling, Jan
A1  - Guenther, Oliver
T1  - Learning from Quality Issues of BPMN Models from Industry
JF  - IEEE software
N2  - Many organizations use business process models to document business operations and formalize business requirements in software-engineering projects. The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), a specification by the Object Management Group, has evolved into the leading standard for process modeling. One challenge is BPMN's complexity: it offers a huge variety of elements and often several representational choices for the same semantics. This raises the question of how well modelers can deal with these choices. Empirical insights into BPMN use from the practitioners' perspective are still missing. To close this gap, researchers analyzed 585 BPMN 2.0 process models from six companies. They found that split and join representations, message flow, the lack of proper model decomposition, and labeling related to quality issues. They give five specific recommendations on how to avoid these issues.
KW  - process model quality
KW  - modeling guidelines
KW  - Business Process Model and Notation
KW  - BPMN
KW  - industry study
KW  - software engineering
KW  - software development
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2015.81
SN  - 0740-7459
SN  - 1937-4194
VL  - 33
SP  - 26
EP  - 33
PB  - Inst. of Electr. and Electronics Engineers
CY  - Los Alamitos
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Günther, Oliver
A1  - Leopold, Henrik
A1  - Mendling, Jan
T1  - Learning from quality issues of BPMN models from industry
BT  - extended abstract
JF  - CEUR Workshop Proceedings
N2  - Many organizations use business process models for documenting their business operations. In recent years, the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) evolved into the leading standard for process modeling. However, BPMN is complex: The specification offers a huge variety of different elements and often several representational choices for the same semantics. This raises the question of how well modelers can deal with these choices. Empirical insights into BPMN usage from the perspective of practitioners are still missing. We close this gap by analyzing a large set of BPMN 2.0 process models from practice. We found that particularly representational choices for splits and joins, the correct use of message flow, the proper decomposition of models, and the consistent labeling appear to be connected with quality issues. Based on our findings we give five recommendations how these issues can be avoided in the future. The work summarized in this extended abstract has been published in [LMG16].
KW  - BPMN modeling guidelines
KW  - Modeling recommendations
KW  - Process model quality
Y1  - 2016
UR  - https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-84996503810&origin=inward&txGid=98101b239363e3f806d7fadf22f788e2
SN  - 1613-0073
VL  - 1701
SP  - 36
EP  - 38
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Günther, Oliver
A1  - Leopold, Henrik
A1  - Mendling, Jan
T1  - Learning from quality issues of BPMN models from industry
JF  - IEEE Software
N2  - Many organizations use business process models to document business operations and formalize business requirements in software-engineering projects. The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), a specification by the Object Management Group, has evolved into the leading standard for process modeling. One challenge is BPMN's complexity: it offers a huge variety of elements and often several representational choices for the same semantics. This raises the question of how well modelers can deal with these choices. Empirical insights into BPMN use from the practitioners' perspective are still missing. To close this gap, researchers analyzed 585 BPMN 2.0 process models from six companies. They found that split and join representations, message flow, the lack of proper model decomposition, and labeling related to quality issues. They give five specific recommendations on how to avoid these issues.
Y1  - 2016
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2015.81
SN  - 0740-7459
VL  - 33
IS  - 4
SP  - 26
EP  - 33
PB  - Inst. of Electr. and Electronics Engineers
CY  - Los Alamitos
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Weidlich, Matthias
A1  - Ziekow, Holger
A1  - Gal, Avigdor
A1  - Mendling, Jan
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Optimizing event pattern matching using business process models
JF  - IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering
N2  - A growing number of enterprises use complex event processing for monitoring and controlling their operations, while business process models are used to document working procedures. In this work, we propose a comprehensive method for complex event processing optimization using business process models. Our proposed method is based on the extraction of behaviorial constraints that are used, in turn, to rewrite patterns for event detection, and select and transform execution plans. We offer a set of rewriting rules that is shown to be complete with respect to the all, seq, and any patterns. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated in an experimental evaluation with a large number of processes from an insurance company. We illustrate that the proposed optimization leads to significant savings in query processing. By integrating the optimization in state-of-the-art systems for event pattern matching, we demonstrate that these savings materialize in different technical infrastructures and can be combined with existing optimization techniques.
KW  - Event processing
KW  - query optimisation
KW  - query rewriting
Y1  - 2014
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1109/TKDE.2014.2302306
SN  - 1041-4347
SN  - 1558-2191
VL  - 26
IS  - 11
SP  - 2759
EP  - 2773
PB  - Inst. of Electr. and Electronics Engineers
CY  - Los Alamitos
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  - Weidlich, Matthias
A1  - Polyvyanyy, Artem
A1  - Mendling, Jan
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Causal behavioural profiles - efficient computation, applications, and evaluation
JF  - Fundamenta informaticae
N2  - Analysis of behavioural consistency is an important aspect of software engineering. In process and service management, consistency verification of behavioural models has manifold applications. For instance, a business process model used as system specification and a corresponding workflow model used as implementation have to be consistent. Another example would be the analysis to what degree a process log of executed business operations is consistent with the corresponding normative process model. Typically, existing notions of behaviour equivalence, such as bisimulation and trace equivalence, are applied as consistency notions. Still, these notions are exponential in computation and yield a Boolean result. In many cases, however, a quantification of behavioural deviation is needed along with concepts to isolate the source of deviation.
 In this article, we propose causal behavioural profiles as the basis for a consistency notion. These profiles capture essential behavioural information, such as order, exclusiveness, and causality between pairs of activities of a process model. Consistency based on these profiles is weaker than trace equivalence, but can be computed efficiently for a broad class of models. In this article, we introduce techniques for the computation of causal behavioural profiles using structural decomposition techniques for sound free-choice workflow systems if unstructured net fragments are acyclic or can be traced back to S-or T-nets. We also elaborate on the findings of applying our technique to three industry model collections.
KW  - Causal Behavioural Profiles
KW  - Formal Methods
KW  - Behavioural Abstraction
KW  - Structural Decomposition
KW  - Exclusiveness
KW  - Concurrency
KW  - Order Relations
KW  - Causality
KW  - Optionality
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3233/FI-2011-614
SN  - 0169-2968
VL  - 113
IS  - 3-4
SP  - 399
EP  - 435
PB  - IOS Press
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Weidlich, Matthias
A1  - Mendling, Jan
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Efficient consistency measurement based on behavioral profiles of process models
JF  - IEEE transactions on software engineering
N2  - Engineering of process-driven business applications can be supported by process modeling efforts in order to bridge the gap between business requirements and system specifications. However, diverging purposes of business process modeling initiatives have led to significant problems in aligning related models at different abstract levels and different perspectives. Checking the consistency of such corresponding models is a major challenge for process modeling theory and practice. In this paper, we take the inappropriateness of existing strict notions of behavioral equivalence as a starting point. Our contribution is a concept called behavioral profile that captures the essential behavioral constraints of a process model. We show that these profiles can be computed efficiently, i.e., in cubic time for sound free-choice Petri nets w.r.t. their number of places and transitions. We use behavioral profiles for the definition of a formal notion of consistency which is less sensitive to model projections than common criteria of behavioral equivalence and allows for quantifying deviation in a metric way. The derivation of behavioral profiles and the calculation of a degree of consistency have been implemented to demonstrate the applicability of our approach. We also report the findings from checking consistency between partially overlapping models of the SAP reference model.
KW  - Process model analysis
KW  - process model alignment
KW  - behavioral abstraction
KW  - consistency checking
KW  - consistency measures
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1109/TSE.2010.96
SN  - 0098-5589
VL  - 37
IS  - 3
SP  - 410
EP  - 429
PB  - Inst. of Electr. and Electronics Engineers
CY  - Los Alamitos
ER  -