TY - JOUR A1 - Ladleif, Jan A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Which event happened first? BT - Deferred choice on blockchain using oracles JF - Frontiers in blockchain N2 - First come, first served: Critical choices between alternative actions are often made based on events external to an organization, and reacting promptly to their occurrence can be a major advantage over the competition. In Business Process Management (BPM), such deferred choices can be expressed in process models, and they are an important aspect of process engines. Blockchain-based process execution approaches are no exception to this, but are severely limited by the inherent properties of the platform: The isolated environment prevents direct access to external entities and data, and the non-continual runtime based entirely on atomic transactions impedes the monitoring and detection of events. In this paper we provide an in-depth examination of the semantics of deferred choice, and transfer them to environments such as the blockchain. We introduce and compare several oracle architectures able to satisfy certain requirements, and show that they can be implemented using state-of-the-art blockchain technology. KW - business processes KW - business process management KW - deferred choice KW - workflow patterns KW - blockchain KW - smart contracts KW - oracles KW - formal semantics Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fbloc.2021.758169 SN - 2624-7852 VL - 4 SP - 1 EP - 16 PB - Frontiers in Blockchain CY - Lausanne, Schweiz ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Awad, Ahmed Mahmoud Hany Aly A1 - Weidlich, Matthias A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Visually specifying compliance rules and explaining their violations for business processes JF - Journal of visual languages and computing N2 - A business process is a set of steps designed to be executed in a certain order to achieve a business value. Such processes are often driven by and documented using process models. Nowadays, process models are also applied to drive process execution. Thus, correctness of business process models is a must. Much of the work has been devoted to check general, domain-independent correctness criteria, such as soundness. However, business processes must also adhere to and show compliance with various regulations and constraints, the so-called compliance requirements. These are domain-dependent requirements. In many situations, verifying compliance on a model level is of great value, since violations can be resolved in an early stage prior to execution. However, this calls for using formal verification techniques, e.g., model checking, that are too complex for business experts to apply. In this paper, we utilize a visual language. BPMN-Q to express compliance requirements visually in a way similar to that used by business experts to build process models. Still, using a pattern based approach, each BPMN-Qgraph has a formal temporal logic expression in computational tree logic (CTL). Moreover, the user is able to express constraints, i.e., compliance rules, regarding control flow and data flow aspects. In order to provide valuable feedback to a user in case of violations, we depend on temporal logic querying approaches as well as BPMN-Q to visually highlight paths in a process model whose execution causes violations. KW - Business process modeling KW - Compliance checking KW - Visual modeling KW - Anti-patterns Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvlc.2010.11.002 SN - 1045-926X VL - 22 IS - 1 SP - 30 EP - 55 PB - Elsevier CY - London ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Yousfi, Alaaeddine A1 - Hewelt, Marcin A1 - Bauer, Christine A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Toward uBPMN-Based patterns for modeling ubiquitous business processes JF - IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics N2 - Ubiquitous business processes are the new generation of processes that pervade the physical space and interact with their environments using a minimum of human involvement. Although they are now widely deployed in the industry, their deployment is still ad hoc . They are implemented after an arbitrary modeling phase or no modeling phase at all. The absence of a solid modeling phase backing up the implementation generates many loopholes that are stressed in the literature. Here, we tackle the issue of modeling ubiquitous business processes. We propose patterns to represent the recent ubiquitous computing features. These patterns are the outcome of an analysis we conducted in the field of human-computer interaction to examine how the features are actually deployed. The patterns' understandability, ease-of-use, usefulness, and completeness are examined via a user experiment. The results indicate that these four indexes are on the positive track. Hence, the patterns may be the backbone of ubiquitous business process modeling in industrial applications. KW - Ubiquitous business process KW - ubiquitous business process model and notation (uBPMN) KW - ubiquitous business process modeling KW - ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2017.2777847 SN - 1551-3203 SN - 1941-0050 VL - 14 IS - 8 SP - 3358 EP - 3367 PB - Inst. of Electr. and Electronics Engineers CY - Piscataway ER - TY - INPR A1 - Weske, Mathias A1 - Rinderle-Ma, Stefanie A1 - Toumani, Farouk A1 - Wolf, Karsten T1 - Special section on BPM 2011 conference. - Special Issue T2 - Information systems Y1 - 2013 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2013.01.003 SN - 0306-4379 VL - 38 IS - 4 SP - 545 EP - 546 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - INPR A1 - Weske, Mathias A1 - Yang, Jian A1 - Maglio, Paul P. T1 - Special issue service oriented computing (ICSOC) guest editors' introduction T2 - International journal of cooperative information systems Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218843012020017 SN - 0218-8430 VL - 21 IS - 1 SP - 1 EP - 2 PB - World Scientific CY - Singapore 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 - Combi, Carlo A1 - Oliboni, Barbara A1 - Weske, Mathias A1 - Zerbato, Francesca T1 - Seamless conceptual modeling of processes with transactional and analytical data JF - Data & knowledge engineering N2 - In the field of Business Process Management (BPM), modeling business processes and related data is a critical issue since process activities need to manage data stored in databases. The connection between processes and data is usually handled at the implementation level, even if modeling both processes and data at the conceptual level should help designers in improving business process models and identifying requirements for implementation. Especially in data -and decision-intensive contexts, business process activities need to access data stored both in databases and data warehouses. In this paper, we complete our approach for defining a novel conceptual view that bridges process activities and data. The proposed approach allows the designer to model the connection between business processes and database models and define the operations to perform, providing interesting insights on the overall connected perspective and hints for identifying activities that are crucial for decision support. KW - Conceptual modeling KW - Business process modeling KW - BPMN KW - Data modeling KW - Data warehouse KW - Decision support Y1 - 2021 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2021.101895 SN - 0169-023X SN - 1872-6933 VL - 134 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kunze, Matthias A1 - Weidlich, Matthias A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Querying process models by behavior inclusion JF - Software and systems modeling N2 - Business processes are vital to managing organizations as they sustain a company's competitiveness. Consequently, these organizations maintain collections of hundreds or thousands of process models for streamlining working procedures and facilitating process implementation. Yet, the management of large process model collections requires effective searching capabilities. Recent research focused on similarity search of process models, but querying process models is still a largely open topic. This article presents an approach to querying process models that takes a process example as input and discovers all models that allow replaying the behavior of the query. To this end, we provide a notion of behavioral inclusion that is based on trace semantics and abstraction. Additional to deciding a match, a closeness score is provided that describes how well the behavior of the query is represented in the model and can be used for ranking. The article introduces the formal foundations of the approach and shows how they are applied to querying large process model collections. An experimental evaluation has been conducted that confirms the suitability of the solution as well as its applicability and scalability in practice. KW - Process model search KW - Behavioral querying KW - Trace inclusion KW - Process model repositories Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-013-0389-6 SN - 1619-1366 SN - 1619-1374 VL - 14 IS - 3 SP - 1105 EP - 1125 PB - Springer CY - Heidelberg ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Weidlich, Matthias A1 - Mendling, Jan A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Propagating changes between aligned process models JF - The journal of systems and software N2 - There is a wide variety of drivers for business process modelling initiatives, reaching from organisational redesign to the development of information systems. Consequently, a common business process is often captured in multiple models that overlap in content due to serving different purposes. Business process management aims at flexible adaptation to changing business needs. Hence, changes of business processes occur frequently and have to be incorporated in the respective process models. Once a process model is changed, related process models have to be updated accordingly, despite the fact that those process models may only be loosely coupled. In this article, we introduce an approach that supports change propagation between related process models. Given a change in one process model, we leverage the behavioural abstraction of behavioural profiles for corresponding activities in order to determine a change region in another model. Our approach is able to cope with changes in pairs of models that are not related by hierarchical refinement and show behavioural inconsistencies. We evaluate the applicability of our approach with two real-world process model collections. To this end, we either deduce change operations from different model revisions or rely on synthetic change operations. KW - Change propagation KW - Model synchronisation KW - Behavioural analysis KW - Process model alignment Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2012.02.044 SN - 0164-1212 VL - 85 IS - 8 SP - 1885 EP - 1898 PB - Elsevier CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bano, Dorina A1 - Michael, Judith A1 - Rumpe, Bernhard A1 - Varga, Simon A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Process-aware digital twin cockpit synthesis from event logs JF - Journal of computer languages N2 - The engineering of digital twins and their user interaction parts with explicated processes, namely processaware digital twin cockpits (PADTCs), is challenging due to the complexity of the systems and the need for information from different disciplines within the engineering process. Therefore, it is interesting to investigate how to facilitate their engineering by using already existing data, namely event logs, and reducing the number of manual steps for their engineering. Current research lacks systematic, automated approaches to derive process-aware digital twin cockpits even though some helpful techniques already exist in the areas of process mining and software engineering. Within this paper, we present a low-code development approach that reduces the amount of hand-written code needed and uses process mining techniques to derive PADTCs. We describe what models could be derived from event log data, which generative steps are needed for the engineering of PADTCs, and how process mining could be incorporated into the resulting application. This process is evaluated using the MIMIC III dataset for the creation of a PADTC prototype for an automated hospital transportation system. This approach can be used for early prototyping of PADTCs as it needs no hand-written code in the first place, but it still allows for the iterative evolvement of the application. This empowers domain experts to create their PADTC prototypes. KW - process-aware digital twin cockpit KW - low-code development approaches KW - sensor data KW - event log KW - process mining KW - process-awareness Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cola.2022.101121 SN - 2590-1184 SN - 2665-9182 VL - 70 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam [u.a.] ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Weidlich, Matthias A1 - Polyvyanyy, Artem A1 - Desai, Nirmit A1 - Mendling, Jan A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Process compliance analysis based on behavioural profiles JF - Information systems N2 - Process compliance measurement is getting increasing attention in companies due to stricter legal requirements and market pressure for operational excellence. In order to judge on compliance of the business processing, the degree of behavioural deviation of a case, i.e., an observed execution sequence, is quantified with respect to a process model (referred to as fitness, or recall). Recently, different compliance measures have been proposed. Still, nearly all of them are grounded on state-based techniques and the trace equivalence criterion, in particular. As a consequence, these approaches have to deal with the state explosion problem. In this paper, we argue that a behavioural abstraction may be leveraged to measure the compliance of a process log - a collection of cases. To this end, we utilise causal behavioural profiles that capture the behavioural characteristics of process models and cases, and can be computed efficiently. We propose different compliance measures based on these profiles, discuss the impact of noise in process logs on our measures, and show how diagnostic information on non-compliance is derived. As a validation, we report on findings of applying our approach in a case study with an international service provider. KW - Process compliance KW - Compliance measurement KW - Log conformance KW - Root cause analysis Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2011.04.002 SN - 0306-4379 VL - 36 IS - 7 SP - 1009 EP - 1025 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - GEN A1 - Weske, Mathias A1 - Sadiq, Shazia A1 - Soffer, Pnina A1 - Voelzer, Hagen T1 - Preface to BPM 2014 T2 - Information systems Y1 - 2016 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2015.09.006 SN - 0306-4379 SN - 1873-6076 VL - 56 SP - 233 EP - 234 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Rogge-Solti, Andreas A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Prediction of business process durations using non-Markovian stochastic Petri nets JF - Information systems N2 - Companies need to efficiently manage their business processes to deliver products and services in time. Therefore, they monitor the progress of individual cases to be able to timely detect undesired deviations and to react accordingly. For example, companies can decide to speed up process execution by raising alerts or by using additional resources, which increases the chance that a certain deadline or service level agreement can be met. Central to such process control is accurate prediction of the remaining time of a case and the estimation of the risk of missing a deadline. To achieve this goal, we use a specific kind of stochastic Petri nets that can capture arbitrary duration distributions. Thereby, we are able to achieve higher prediction accuracy than related approaches. Further, we evaluate the approach in comparison to state of the art approaches and show the potential of exploiting a so far untapped source of information: the elapsed time since the last observed event. Real-world case studies in the financial and logistics domain serve to illustrate and evaluate the approach presented. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. KW - Business processes KW - Duration prediction KW - Risk control KW - Stochastic Petri nets Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2015.04.004 SN - 0306-4379 SN - 1873-6076 VL - 54 SP - 1 EP - 14 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford 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 - Polyvyanyy, Artem A1 - Garcia-Banuelos, Luciano A1 - Fahland, Dirk A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Maximal structuring of acyclic process models JF - The computer journal : a publication of the British Computer Society N2 - This article addresses the transformation of a process model with an arbitrary topology into an equivalent structured process model. In particular, this article studies the subclass of process models that have no equivalent well-structured representation but which, nevertheless, can be partially structured into their maximally-structured representation. The transformations are performed under a behavioral equivalence notion that preserves the observed concurrency of tasks in equivalent process models. The article gives a full characterization of the subclass of acyclic process models that have no equivalent well-structured representation, but do have an equivalent maximally-structured one, as well as proposes a complete structuring method. Together with our previous results, this article completes the solution of the process model structuring problem for the class of acyclic process models. KW - process modeling KW - structured process model KW - maximal structuring KW - model transformation KW - fully concurrent bisimulation Y1 - 2014 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxs126 SN - 0010-4620 SN - 1460-2067 VL - 57 IS - 1 SP - 12 EP - 35 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford 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 - INPR A1 - Dumas, Marlon A1 - Recker, Jan A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Management and engineering of process-aware information systems: Introduction to the special issue T2 - INFORMATION SYSTEMS Y1 - 2012 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2011.09.003 SN - 0306-4379 VL - 37 IS - 2 SP - 77 EP - 79 PB - PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD CY - OXFORD ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Decker, Gero A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Interaction-centric modeling of process choreographies JF - Information systems N2 - With the rise of electronic integration between organizations, the need for a precise specification of interaction behavior increases. Information systems, replacing interaction previously carried out by humans via phone, faxes and emails, require a precise specification for handling all possible situations. Such interaction behavior is described in process choreographies. While many proposals for choreography languages have already been made, most of them fall into the category of interconnection models, where the observable behavior of the different partners is described and then related via message flow. As this article will show, this modeling approach fails to support fundamental design principles of choreographies and typically leads to modeling errors. This motivates an alternative modeling style, namely interaction modeling, for overcoming these limitations. While the main concepts are independent of a concrete modeling language, iBPMN is introduced as novel interaction modeling language. Formal execution semantics are provided and a comprehensive toolset implementing the approach is presented. KW - Choreographies KW - B2B process integration KW - Interaction modeling KW - Business Process Modeling Notation Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2010.06.005 SN - 0306-4379 VL - 36 IS - 2 SP - 292 EP - 312 PB - Elsevier CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Decker, Gero A1 - Kopp, Oliver A1 - Leymann, Frank A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Interacting services : from specification to execution N2 - Interacting services play a key role to realize business process integration among different business partners by means of electronic message exchange. In order to provide seamless integration of these services, the messages exchanged as well as their dependencies must be well-defined. Service choreographies are a means to describe the allowed conversations. This article presents a requirements framework for service choreography languages, along which existing choreography languages are assessed. The requirements framework provides the basis for introducing the language BPEL4Chor, which extends the industry standard WS-BPEL with choreography-specific concepts. A validation is provided and integration with executable service orchestrations is discussed. Y1 - 2009 UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0169023X U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2009.04.003 SN - 0169-023X ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Herzberg, Nico A1 - Meyer, Andreas A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Improving business process intelligence by observing object state transitions JF - Data & knowledge engineering N2 - During the execution of business processes several events happen that are recorded in the company's information systems. These events deliver insights into process executions so that process monitoring and analysis can be performed resulting, for instance, in prediction of upcoming process steps or the analysis of the run time of single steps. While event capturing is trivial when a process engine with integrated logging capabilities is used, manual process execution environments do not provide automatic logging of events, so that typically external devices, like bar code scanners, have to be used. As experience shows, these manual steps are error-prone and induce additional work. Therefore, we use object state transitions as additional monitoring information, so-called object state transition events. Based on these object state transition events, we reason about the enablement and termination of activities and provide the basis for process monitoring and analysis in terms of a large event log. In this paper, we present the concept to utilize information from these object state transition events for capturing process progress. Furthermore, we discuss a methodology to create the required design time artifacts that then are used for monitoring at run time. In a proof-of-concept implementation, we show how the design time and run time side work and prove applicability of the introduced concept of object state transition events. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. KW - Business process management KW - Events KW - Data KW - Process Monitoring KW - BPMN Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.datak.2015.07.008 SN - 0169-023X SN - 1872-6933 VL - 98 SP - 144 EP - 164 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER -