Marcin Hewelt

Towards a Methodology for the Engineering of Event-Driven Process Applications

Successful applications of the Internet of Things such as smart cities, smart logistics, and predictive maintenance, build on observing and analyzing business-related objects in the real world for business process execution and monitoring. In this context, complex event processing is increasingly used to integrate events from sensors with events stemming from business process management systems. This paper describes a methodology to combine the areas and engineer an event-driven logistics processes application. Thereby, we describe the requirements, use cases and lessons learned to design and implement such an architecture.

Business process architectures with multiplicities: transformation and correctness

Business processes are instrumental to manage work in organisations. To study the interdependencies between business processes, Business Process Architectures (BPA) have been introduced. These express trigger and message flow relations between business processes. When we investigate real world business process architectures we find complex interdependencies, involving multiple process instances. These aspects have not been studied in detail so far, especially concerning correctness properties. In this paper, we propose a modular transformation of BPAs to open nets for the analysis of behavior involving multiple business processes instances with multi-communication.

A Hybrid Approach for Flexible Case Modeling and Execution

While the business process management community has concentrated on modelling and executing business processes with a known structure, support for processes with a high degree of variability performed by knowledge workers is still not satisfactory. A promising approach to overcome this deficiency is case management. Despite of the work done in the area of case management in recent years, there is no accepted case handling formalism that features a well defined semantics. This paper introduces a novel approach to case management, which is based on dynamically combining process fragments as required by knowledge workers. An operational semantics defines the meaning of case models in detail, using states of data objects and enablement conditions of process fragments.

Deriving Business Process Data Architecturesfrom Process Model Collections

The focus in BPM shifts from single processes to process interactions. Business process architectures were established as convenient way to model and analyze such interactions on an abstract level focusing on message and trigger relations. Shared data objects are often a means of interrelating processes. In this paper, we extract hidden data dependencies between processes from process models with data annotations and their object life cycles. This information is used to construct a business process architecture, thus enabling analysis with existing methods. We describe and validate our approach on an extract from a case study that demonstrates its applicability to real world use cases.

A Tool for Business Process Architecture Analysis

Business Process Architectures BPA are used for structuring and managing process collections. For optimising business processes a high level view on their interdependencies is necessary. BPAs allow to capture message and trigger flow relations between processes and their multiple process instances within a process collection. However, tools that allow analysis of BPAs besides visualization do not exist. This contribution presents a novel tool to model and to analyse the correctness of a BPA by transforming it into open nets, translate the correctness criteria into CTL formula and model check those using LoLA.

A Framework for Integrating Real-World Events and Business Processes in an IoT Environment

Business process management is essential for companies to document, execute, monitor, and optimize their business processes. These processes are often influenced by external events occurring in the process context, especially when considering Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. Modeling constructs for different types of events are part of the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard. However, when the integration of external events needs to be supported by process-oriented information systems, the gap between conceptual process model and its implementation needs to be bridged. We elicited the requirements for this integration using an use case from the IoT domain. Based on them, we propose a framework that outsources the management of events to an event processing platform that the process engine subscribes to. The BPMN process model is extended with annotations to specify the type of expected events. Further, we implement a system that realizes the proposed integration..

Modelling distributed network security in a petri net- and agent-based approach

Distributed network security is an important concern in modern business environments. Access to critical information and areas has to be limited to authorised users. The Herold research project aims to provide a novel way of managing distributed network security through the means of agent-based software. In this paper we present the first models, both conceptual and technical that have been produced in this project. Furthermore we examine the Paose development approach used within the project and how it contributes to Herold.

Recommendations for Medical Treatment Processes: The PIGS Approach

Medical treatment processes in hospitals are complex interactions of various actors, in the course of which treatment decisions have to be made.Clinical practice guidelines and clinical pathways provide guidance for practicioners for certain diseases. Especially for multi-morbid patients several guidelines and pathways might apply. Current process-oriented IT support in hospitals, however, does not consider multiple models for treatment recommendations.

Integrating IoT Devices into Business Processes

The Internet of Things (IoT) has arrived in everyday life, controlling and measuring everything from assembly lines, through shipping containers to household appliances. Thus, IoT devices are often part of larger and more complex business processes, which might change their course based on events from these devices. However, when developing IoT applications the process perspective is often neglected and coordination of devices is realized in an ad-hoc way using custom scripts. In this paper we propose to employ process model to define the process layer of IoT applications and enact them through a process engine. Our approach thus bridges the gap between physical IoT devices and business processes. The presented implementation shows that those two can be combined without in-depth programming expertise or extensive configuration, without restricting or strongly coupling the components.

Towards Implementing REST-Enabled Business Process Choreographies

When it comes to the interaction on the Web, one of the most adopted architectural styles is REST. On the modeling side, business process choreographies model the inter-organizational processes that are performed by business participants to reach a common goal. Bridging the gap between the modeling level and the RESTful interactions is challenging. We tackle this challenge by introducing an intermediary RESTful service that assures the correct execution of the choreography by guiding the participants to adhere to the commonly agreed interactions. Moreover, this service allows human participants to partake in the choreography without having a complex system in place.