Eric Verbeek

Process Mining Manifesto

Process mining techniques are able to extract knowledge from event logs commonly available in today’s information systems. These techniques provide new means to discover, monitor, and improve processes in a variety of application domains. There are two main drivers for the growing interest in process mining. On the one hand, more and more events are being recorded, thus, providing detailed information about the history of processes. On the other hand, there is a need to improve and support business processes in competitive and rapidly changing environments. This manifesto is created by the IEEE Task Force on Process Mining and aims to promote the topic of process mining. Moreover, by defining a set of guiding principles and listing important challenges, this manifesto hopes to serve as a guide for software developers, scientists, consultants, business managers, and end-users. The goal is to increase the maturity of process mining as a new tool to improve the (re)design, control, and support of operational business processes.

Formal semantics and analysis of control flow in WS-BPEL

Web service composition refers to the creation of new (Web) services by combination of functionality provided by existing ones. This paradigm has gained significant attention in the Web services community and is seen as a pillar for building service-oriented applications. A number of domain-specific languages for service composition have been proposed with consensus being formed around a process-oriented language known as WS-BPEL (or BPEL). The kernel of BPEL consists of simple communication primitives that may be combined using control-flow constructs expressing sequence, branching, parallelism, synchronisation, etc. As a result, BPEL process definitions lend themselves to static flow-based analysis techniques. In this report, we describe a tool that performs two useful types of static checks and extracts meta-data to optimise dynamic resource management. The tool operates by translating BPEL processes into Petri nets and exploiting existing Petri net analysis techniques. It relies on a comprehensive and rigorously defined mapping of BPEL constructs into Petri net structures.

Petri Net Transformations for Business Processes --- A Survey

In Process-Aware Information Systems, business processes are often modeled in an explicit way. Roughly speaking, the available business process modeling languages can be divided into two groups.Languages from the first group are preferred by academic people but shunned by business people, and include Petri nets and process algebras. These academic languages have a proper formal semantics, which allows the corresponding academic models to be verified in a formal way. Languages from the second group are preferred by business people but disliked by academic people, and include BPEL, BPMN, and EPCs. These business languages often lack any proper semantics, which often leads to debates on how to interpret certain business models. Nevertheless, business models are used in practice, whereas academic models are hardly used. To be able to use, for example, the abundance of Petri net verification techniques on business models, we need to be able to transform these models to Petri nets. In this paper, we investigate a number of Petri net transformations that already exist.For every transformation, we investigate the transformation itself, the constructs in the business models that are problematic for the transformation and the main applications for the transformation.

Dynamic Work Distribution in Workflow Management Systems: How to Balance Quality and Performance

Todays workflow management systems offer work items to workers using rather primitive mechanisms.Although most workflow systems support a role-based distribution of work, they have problems dealing with unavailability of workers as a result of vacation or illness, overloading, context-dependent suitability, deadlines, and delegation. As a result, the work is offered to too few, too many, or even the wrong set of workers. Current practice is to offer a work item to one person, thus causing problems when the person is not present or too busy, or to offer it to a set of people sharing a given role, thus not incorporating the qualifications and preferences of people. Literature on work distribution is typically driven by considerations related to authorizations and permissions. However, workflow processes are operational processes where there is a highly dynamic trade-off between quality and performance. For example, an approaching deadline and an overloaded specialist may be the trigger to offer work items to less qualified workers. This paper addresses this problem by proposing a systematic approach to dynamically create a balance between quality and performance issues in workflow systems. We illustrate and evaluate the proposed approach with a realistic example and also compare how a workflow system would implement this scenario to highlight the shortcomings of current, state of the art workflow systems. Finally, a detailed simulation model is used to validate our approach.

WofBPEL: a tool for automated analysis of BPEL processes

The Business Process Execution Language for Web Service, known as BPEL4WS, more recently as WS-BPEL (or BPEL for short) [1], is a process definition language geared towards Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) and layered on top of the Web services technology stack. In BPEL, the logic of the interactions between a given service and its environment is described as a composition of communication actions. These communication actions are interrelated by control-flow dependencies expressed through constructs close to those found in workflow definition languages. In particular, BPEL incorporates two sophisticated branching and synchronisation constructs, namely “control links” and “join conditions”, which can be found in a class of workflow models known as synchronising workflows formalised in terms of Petri nets in [3].

Woflan 2.0: a Petri-net-based workflow diagnosis tool

Workflow management technology promises a flexible solution facilitating the easy creation of new business processes and modification of existing ones. Unfortunately, most of todays workflow products allow for erroneous processes to be put in production: these products lack proper verificationmechanisms in their process-definition tools for the created or modified processes. This paper presents the workflow diagnosis tool Woflan, which fills this gap. Using Petri-net based techniques, Woflan diagnoses process definitions before they are put into production. These process definitions can be imported from commercial workflow products. Furthermore, Woflan guides the modeler of a workflow process definition towards finding and correcting possible errors.

Guest editorial: Business process management: Where business processes and web services meet

Business Process Management (BPM) includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. This special issue presents papers, which contribute to the state of the art of BPM, and should be considered as a spin-off of the successful 2005 edition of the International Conference on Business Process Management. In this guest editorial we introduce the four papers in this special issue and comment on recent developments in the broader BPM domain.

Comparing and evaluating Petri net semantics for BPEL

We compare two Petri net semantics for the Web Services Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). The comparison reveals different modelling decisions. These decisions together with their consequences are discussed. We also give an overview of the different properties that can be verified on the resulting models. A case study helps to evaluate the corresponding compilers which transform a BPEL process into a Petri net model.

Discovering Hierarchical Process Models Using ProM

Process models can be seen as “maps” describing the operational processes of organizations. Traditional process discovery algorithms have problems dealing with fine-grained event logs and less-structured processes. The discovered models (i.e., “maps”) are spaghetti-like and are difficult to comprehend or even misleading. One of the reasons for this can be attributed to the fact that the discovered models are flat (without any hierarchy). In this paper, we demonstrate the discovery of hierarchical process models using a set of interrelated plugins implemented in ProM. The hierarchy is enabled through the automated discovery of abstractions (of activities) with domain significance.

Creating sound and reversible configurable process models using CoSeNets

All Dutch municipalities offer the same range of services, and the processes delivering these services are quite similar. Therefore, these municipalities can benefit from configurable process models. This requires the merging of existing process variants into configurable models. Unfortunately, existing merging techniques (1) allow for configurable process models which can be instantiated to unsound process models, and (2) are not always reversible, which means that not all original models can be obtained by instantiation of the configurable process model. In this paper, we propose to capture the control-flow of a process by a CoSeNet: a configurable, tree-like representation of the process model, which is sound by construction, and we describe how to merge two CoSeNets into another CoSeNet such that the merge is reversible. Initial experiments show that this approach does not influence complexity significantly, i.e. it results in similar complexities for the configurable process model compared to existing techniques, while it guarantees soundness and reversibility.