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 - Bazhenova, Ekaterina A1 - Zerbato, Francesca A1 - Oliboni, Barbara A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - From BPMN process models to DMN decision models JF - Information systems N2 - The interplay between process and decision models plays a crucial role in business process management, as decisions may be based on running processes and affect process outcomes. Often process models include decisions that are encoded through process control flow structures and data flow elements, thus reducing process model maintainability. The Decision Model and Notation (DMN) was proposed to achieve separation of concerns and to possibly complement the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) for designing decisions related to process models. Nevertheless, deriving decision models from process models remains challenging, especially when the same data underlie both process and decision models. In this paper, we explore how and to which extent the data modeled in BPMN processes and used for decision-making may be represented in the corresponding DMN decision models. To this end, we identify a set of patterns that capture possible representations of data in BPMN processes and that can be used to guide the derivation of decision models related to existing process models. Throughout the paper we refer to real-world healthcare processes to show the applicability of the proposed approach. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. KW - Business process models KW - Decision models KW - BPMN KW - DMN KW - Pattern Y1 - 2019 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2019.02.001 SN - 0306-4379 SN - 1873-6076 VL - 83 SP - 69 EP - 88 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - GEN A1 - Pufahl, Luise A1 - Wong, Tsun Yin A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Design of an extensible BPMN process simulator T2 - Business Process Management Workshops (BPM 2017) N2 - Business process simulation is an important means for quantitative analysis of a business process and to compare different process alternatives. With the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) being the state-of-the-art language for the graphical representation of business processes, many existing process simulators support already the simulation of BPMN diagrams. However, they do not provide well-defined interfaces to integrate new concepts in the simulation environment. In this work, we present the design and architecture of a proof-of-concept implementation of an open and extensible BPMN process simulator. It also supports the simulation of multiple BPMN processes at a time and relies on the building blocks of the well-founded discrete event simulation. The extensibility is assured by a plug-in concept. Its feasibility is demonstrated by extensions supporting new BPMN concepts, such as the simulation of business rule activities referencing decision models and batch activities. KW - Business process simulation KW - Extensibility KW - BPMN Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-3-319-74030-0 SN - 978-3-319-74029-4 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74030-0_62 SN - 1865-1348 VL - 308 SP - 782 EP - 795 PB - Springer CY - Berlin 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 - 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 - BOOK A1 - Meyer, Andreas A1 - Pufahl, Luise A1 - Fahland, Dirk A1 - Weske, Mathias T1 - Modeling and enacting complex data dependencies in business processes N2 - Enacting business processes in process engines requires the coverage of control flow, resource assignments, and process data. While the first two aspects are well supported in current process engines, data dependencies need to be added and maintained manually by a process engineer. Thus, this task is error-prone and time-consuming. In this report, we address the problem of modeling processes with complex data dependencies, e.g., m:n relationships, and their automatic enactment from process models. First, we extend BPMN data objects with few annotations to allow data dependency handling as well as data instance differentiation. Second, we introduce a pattern-based approach to derive SQL queries from process models utilizing the above mentioned extensions. Therewith, we allow automatic enactment of data-aware BPMN process models. We implemented our approach for the Activiti process engine to show applicability. N2 - Die Ausführung von Geschäftsprozessen in Process Engines benötigt Informationen über den Kontrollfluss, die Rollenzuordnungen und die Datenabhängigkeiten. Während die ersten beiden Aspekte bereits automatisiert von Process Engines unterstützt werden, müssen die Datenabhängigkeiten durch einen Prozessingenieur manuell hinzugefügt und gewartet werden. Allerdings ist diese Aufgabe sehr fehleranfällig und zeitintensiv. In diesem Report zeigen wir wie Prozesse mit komplexen Datenabhängigkeiten, z.B. m:n Beziehungen, modelliert und automatisiert ausgeführt werden können. Dazu erweitern wir zuerst BPMN Datenobjekte mit wenigen Annotationen, um das Handling von Datenabhängikeiten sowie die Differenzierung von Datenobjektinstanzen zu ermöglichen. Danach beschreiben wir einen Pattern-basierten Ansatz, um SQL-Queries, unter Nutzung der oben erwähnten Erweiterungen, aus Prozessmodellen abzuleiten. Damit erlauben wir die automatisierte Ausführung von Daten-orientierten BPMN Prozessmodellen. Um die Anwendbarkeit unseres Ansatzen zu demonstieren, implementierten wir ihn für die Process Engine Activiti. T3 - Technische Berichte des Hasso-Plattner-Instituts für Digital Engineering an der Universität Potsdam - 74 KW - Prozessmodellierung KW - Datenmodellierung KW - Prozessausführung KW - BPMN KW - SQL KW - Process Modeling KW - Data Modeling KW - Process Enactment KW - BPMN KW - SQL Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-65103 SN - 978-3-86956-245-2 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER -