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  - 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  - Haarmann, Stephan
A1  - Holfter, Adrian
A1  - Pufahl, Luise
A1  - Weske, Mathias
T1  - Formal framework for checking compliance of data-driven case management
JF  - Journal on data semantics : JoDS
N2  - Business processes are often specified in descriptive or normative models. Both types of models should adhere to internal and external regulations, such as company guidelines or laws. Employing compliance checking techniques, it is possible to verify process models against rules. While traditionally compliance checking focuses on well-structured processes, we address case management scenarios. In case management, knowledge workers drive multi-variant and adaptive processes. Our contribution is based on the fragment-based case management approach, which splits a process into a set of fragments. The fragments are synchronized through shared data but can, otherwise, be dynamically instantiated and executed. We formalize case models using Petri nets. We demonstrate the formalization for design-time and run-time compliance checking and present a proof-of-concept implementation. The application of the implemented compliance checking approach to a use case exemplifies its effectiveness while designing a case model. The empirical evaluation on a set of case models for measuring the performance of the approach shows that rules can often be checked in less than a second.
KW  - Compliance checking
KW  - Case management
KW  - Model verification
KW  - Data-centric
KW  - processes
Y1  - 2021
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1007/s13740-021-00120-3
SN  - 1861-2032
SN  - 1861-2040
VL  - 10
IS  - 1-2
SP  - 143
EP  - 163
PB  - Springer
CY  - Heidelberg
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  - 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  - 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  - 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  - 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  -