Kevin Göser

On enabling integrated process compliance with semantic constraints in process management systems

Key to broad use of process management systems (PrMS) in practice is their ability to foster and ease the implementation, execution, monitoring, and adaptation of business processes while still being able to ensure robust and error-free process enactment. To meet these demands a variety of mechanisms has been developed to prevent errors at the structural level (e.g., deadlocks). In many application domains, however, processes often have to comply with business level rules and policies (i.e., semantic constraints) as well. Hence, to ensure error-free executions at the semantic level, PrMS need certain control mechanisms for validating and ensuring the compliance with semantic constraints. In this paper, we discuss fundamental requirements for a comprehensive support of semantic constraints in PrMS. Moreover, we provide a survey on existing approaches and discuss to what extent they are able to meet the requirements and which challenges still have to be tackled. In order to tackle the particular challenge of providing integrated compliance support over the process lifecycle, we introduce the SeaFlows framework. The framework introduces a behavioural level view on processes which serves a conceptual process representation for constraint specification approaches. Further, it provides general compliance criteria for static compliance validation but also for dealing with process changes. Altogether, the SeaFlows framework can serve as formal basis for realizing integrated support of semantic constraints in PrMS.

SeaFlows Toolset – Compliance Verification Made Easy for Process-Aware Information Systems

In the light of an increasing demand on business process compliance, the verification of process models against compliance rules has become essential in enterprise computing. The SeaFlows Toolset featured in this paper extends process-aware information systems with compliance checking functionality. It provides a user-friendly environment for modeling compliance rules using a graph-based formalism and for enriching process models with these rules. To address a multitude of verification settings, we provide two complementary compliance checking approaches: The structural compliance checking approach derives structural criteria from compliance rules and applies them to detect incompliance. The data-aware behavioral compliance checking approach addresses the state explosion problem that can occur when the data dimension is explored during compliance checking. It performs context-sensitive automatic abstraction to derive an abstract process model which is more compact with regard to the data dimension enabling more efficient compliance checking. Altogether, SeaFlows Toolset constitutes a comprehensive and extensible framework for compliance checking of process models.

Towards Truly Flexible and Adaptive Process-Aware Information Systems

If current process management systems shall be applied to a broad spectrum of applications, they will have to be significantly improved with respect to their technological capabilities. Particularly, in dynamic environments it must be possible to quickly implement and deploy new processes, to enable ad-hoc modifications of running process instances on-the-fly (e.g., to dynamically add, delete or move process steps), and to support process schema evolution with instance migration (i.e., to propagate process schema changes to already running instances if desired). These requirements must be met without affecting process consistency and by preserving the robustness of the process management system. In this paper we describe how these challenges have been addressed and solved in the ADEPT2 Process Management System. Our overall vision is to provide a next generation process management technology which can be used in a variety of application domains.

From ADEPT to AristaFlow BPM Suite: A Research Vision Has Become Reality

During the last decade we have developed the ADEPT next generation process management technology. Its features and its different prototype versions attracted a number of companies. However, an enterprise cannot base the implementation of its process-aware information system (PAIS) on an experimental prototype, especially if maintenance and further development are not assured. At the beginning of 2008, therefore, we founded a spin-off as joint venture with industrial partners to transfer ADEPT into an industrial-strength product version called AristaFlow BPM Suite, and to provide maintenance support for it. The product version is now available for academic and industrial use.

Architectural Design of Flexible Process Management Technology

To provide effective support, process-aware information systems (PAIS) must not freeze existing business processes. Instead they should enable authorized users to deviate on-the-fly from the implemented processes and to dynamically evolve them over time. While there has been a lot of work on the theoretical foundations of dynamic process changes, there is still a lack of PAIS implementing this dynamics. Designing the architecture of respective technology constitutes a big challenge due to the high complexity coming with dynamic processes. Besides this, performance, robustness, security and usability of the system must not be affected by the added flexibility. In the AristaFlow project we have taken a holistic approach to master this complexity. Based on a conceptual framework for flexible process enactment and dynamic processes, we have designed a sophisticated architecture for next generation process management technology. This paper discusses major design goals and basic architectural principles, gives insights into selected system components, and shows how change support features can be realized in an integrated and effective manner.

Von ADEPT zur AristaFlow® BPM Suite - eine Vision wird Realität: "Correctness by Construction" und flexible, robuste Ausführung von Unternehmensprozessen

Workflow-Management-Systeme (WfMS) sind mittlerweile machtige Werkzeuge fur die computerunterstutzte Ausfuhrung von Geschaftsprozessen. Letztere konnen unabhangig von spezifischen Anwendungen modelliert, ausgefuhrt und uberwacht werden. Trotzdem existieren auf dem Software-Markt noch zahlreiche Anwendungen mit im Code fest verdrahteter Prozesslogik. Die Ursache dafur, dass konventionelle WfMS bei der Entwicklung prozessorientierter Anwendungen noch nicht die erhoffte Verbreitung erfahren haben, ist zum einen auf ihre Architektur und zum anderen auf ihr aktivitatsorientiertes Paradigma zuruckzufuhren. Die Verwaltung von Anwendungsdaten erfolgt, auserhalb des WfMS, d.h. innerhalb der eingebundenen externen Applikationen. Geschaftsprozesse und Geschaftsdaten konnen jedoch nicht unabhangig voneinander betrachtet werden, sondern Prozessmodelle sollten in Analogie zur Datenstruktur definiert werden konnen. Des Weiteren sind die in WfMS fest vorgegebenen Kontrollstrukturen zu starr fur die Ausfuhrung datenorientierter Prozesse. Der Fortschritt eines Prozesses ist hier nicht primar abhangig von bereits ausgefuhrten Aktivitaten, sondern von Anderungen der Attributwerte innerhalb der Anwendungsobjekte. In diesem Artikel fassen wir die charakteristischen Eigenschaften von daten- und prozessorientierten Anwendungen zusammen, die wir anhand verschiedener Fallstudien gesammelt haben. Wir zeigen, in wie weit konventionelle WfMS diesen Herausforderungen gewachsen sind. Auf dieser Basis leiten wir die Anforderungen ab, die eine generische Komponente zur Unterstutzung datengetriebener Prozesse mit einer integrierten Sicht auf Prozesse und Daten, erfullen sollte.