TY  - JOUR
A1  - Yousfi, Alaaeddine
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Discovering commute patterns via process mining
JF  - Knowledge and Information Systems
N2  - Ubiquitous computing has proven its relevance and efficiency in improving the user experience across a myriad of situations. It is now the ineluctable solution to keep pace with the ever-changing environments in which current systems operate. Despite the achievements of ubiquitous computing, this discipline is still overlooked in business process management. This is surprising, since many of today’s challenges, in this domain, can be addressed by methods and techniques from ubiquitous computing, for instance user context and dynamic aspects of resource locations. This paper takes a first step to integrate methods and techniques from ubiquitous computing in business process management. To do so, we propose discovering commute patterns via process mining. Through our proposition, we can deduce the users’ significant locations, routes, travel times and travel modes. This information can be a stepping-stone toward helping the business process management community embrace the latest achievements in ubiquitous computing, mainly in location-based service. To corroborate our claims, a user study was conducted. The significant places, routes, travel modes and commuting times of our test subjects were inferred with high accuracies. All in all, ubiquitous computing can enrich the processes with new capabilities that go beyond what has been established in business process management so far.
KW  - Commute pattern
KW  - Commute process
KW  - Process mining
KW  - Ubiquitous computing
KW  - Location-based services
Y1  - 2019
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-018-1255-1
SN  - 0219-1377
SN  - 0219-3116
VL  - 60
IS  - 2
SP  - 691
EP  - 713
PB  - Springer
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  - 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  - 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  - 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  - 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  - 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  - 
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  - 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  - 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  - 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  - Polyvyanyy, Artem
A1  - Weidlich, Matthias
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Connectivity of workflow nets the foundations of stepwise verification
JF  - Acta informatica
N2  - Behavioral models capture operational principles of real-world or designed systems. Formally, each behavioral model defines the state space of a system, i.e., its states and the principles of state transitions. Such a model is the basis for analysis of the system's properties. In practice, state spaces of systems are immense, which results in huge computational complexity for their analysis. Behavioral models are typically described as executable graphs, whose execution semantics encodes a state space. The structure theory of behavioral models studies the relations between the structure of a model and the properties of its state space. In this article, we use the connectivity property of graphs to achieve an efficient and extensive discovery of the compositional structure of behavioral models; behavioral models get stepwise decomposed into components with clear structural characteristics and inter-component relations. At each decomposition step, the discovered compositional structure of a model is used for reasoning on properties of the whole state space of the system. The approach is exemplified by means of a concrete behavioral model and verification criterion. That is, we analyze workflow nets, a well-established tool for modeling behavior of distributed systems, with respect to the soundness property, a basic correctness property of workflow nets. Stepwise verification allows the detection of violations of the soundness property by inspecting small portions of a model, thereby considerably reducing the amount of work to be done to perform soundness checks. Besides formal results, we also report on findings from applying our approach to an industry model collection.
Y1  - 2011
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-011-0137-8
SN  - 0001-5903
VL  - 48
IS  - 4
SP  - 213
EP  - 242
PB  - Springer
CY  - New York
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  - Pernici, Barbara
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Business process management
Y1  - 2006
SN  - 0169-023X
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  - 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  - 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  - Luebbe, Alexander
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Determining the effect of tangible business process modeling
Y1  - 2012
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  -