Alexander Grosskopf

A Graphical Notation for Modeling Complex Events in Business Processes

Using complex event rules for capturing dependencies between business processes is an emerging trend in enterprise information systems. In previous work we have identified a set of requirements for event extensions for business process modeling languages. This paper introduces a graphical language for modeling composite events in business processes, namely BEMN, that fulfills all these requirements. These include event conjunction, disjunction and inhibition as well as cardinality of events whose graphical expression can be factored into flow-oriented process modeling and event rule modeling. Formal semantics for the language are provided.

Complex events in business processes

Flow-oriented process modeling languages have a long tradition in the area of Business Process Management and are widely used for capturing activities with their behavioral and data dependencies. Individual events were introduced for triggering process instantiation and activities. However, real-world business cases drive the need for also covering complex event patterns as they are known in the field of Complex Event Processing. Therefore, this paper puts forward a catalog of requirements for handling complex events in process models, which can be used as reference framework for assessing process definition languages and systems. An assessment of BPEL and BPMN is provided.

Tangible Business Process Modeling – Methodology and Experiment Design

Visualized business process models are the central artifacts to communicate knowledge about working procedures in organizations. Since more organizations take the process perspective to share knowledge and make decisions, it is worth investigating how the processes are elicited.

Semantics of standard process models with OR-joins

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is an emerging standard for capturing business processes. Like its predecessors, BPMN lacks a formal semantics and many of its features are subject to interpretation. One construct of BPMN that has an ambiguous semantics is the OR-join. Several formal semantics of this construct have been proposed for similar languages such as EPCs and YAWL. However, these existing semantics are computationally expensive. This paper formulates a semantics of the OR-join in BPMN for which enablement of an OR-join in a process model can be evaluated in quadratic time in terms of the total number of elements in the model. This complexity can be reduced down to linear-time after materializing a quadratic-sized data structure at design-time. The paper also shows how to efficiently detect the enablement of an OR-join incrementally as the execution of a process instance unfolds.

Realising Dead Path Elimination in BPMN

The Web Service Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) lacks any standard graphical notation. Various efforts have been undertaken to visualize BPEL using the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN). Although this is straightforward for the majority of concepts, it is tricky for the full BPEL standard, partly due to the insufficiently specified BPMN execution semantics. The upcoming BPMN~2.0 revision will provide this clear semantics. In this paper, we show how the dead path elimination (DPE) capabilities of BPEL can be expressed with this new semantics and discuss the limitations. We provide a generic formal definition of DPE and discuss resulting control flow requirements independent of specific process description languages.

BPMNCommunity.org: A Forum for Process Modeling Practitioners – A Data Repository for Empirical BPM Research

This short paper reports on an online platform where modelers can gather, share and discuss knowledge around BPMN. The models, ratings, comments and discussions are no longer based on pictures but related to actual process models that can be edited in the web browser. After two months 97 registered users developed and shared 166 process models and 372 revisions. In this paper we introduce the platform, show its architecture and provide samples for data extraction and analysis. We invite researchers to use the available data to conduct further empirical studies.

Syncro - concurrent editing library for Google wave

The web accelerated the way people collaborate globally distributed.With Google Wave, a rich and extensible real-time collaboration platform is becoming available to a large audience. Google implements an operational transformation (OT) approach to resolve conflicting concurrent edits. However, the OT interface is not available for developers of Wave feature extensions, such as collaborative model editors. Therefore, programmers have to implement their own conflict management solution. This paper presents our lightweight library called syncro. Syncro addresses the problem in a general fashion and can be used for Wave gadget programming as well as for other collaboration platforms that need to maintain a common distributed state.

Lightweight collaboration management

Collaboration processes are generally coordinated without an explicit notion of a guiding process. Even though this kind of work is performed in a rather structured manner, explicit software support to coordinate these processes is rare. On the other hand, process automation is mainly considered for highly frequent processes, due to the cumbersome setup of adequate systems and the process implementation effort. This paper presents a mashup that effectively coordinates humans who strive for a collaborative goal. Participants can design and enact their processes right away; a lightweight process execution engine automatically coordinates participants through correlated messages. In contrast to classic mashups, we turn the architecture upside down and orchestrate Web applications and their respective service APIs. A process map, similar to classic mapping mashups, gives insight into the current state of a process and its activities as well as information that is required to evaluate and trace process history.