Mathias Weske

Business process management: a survey

Business Process Management (BPM) includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. It can be considered as an extension of classical Workflow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. Although the practical relevance of BPM is undisputed, a clear definition of BPM and related acronyms such as BAM, BPA, and STP are missing. Moreover, a clear scientific foundation is missing. In this paper, we try to demystify the acronyms in this domain, describe the state-of-the-art technology, and argue that BPM could benefit from formal methods/languages (cf. Petri nets, process algebras, etc.).

Case handling: a new paradigm for business process support

Case handling is a new paradigm for supporting flexible and knowledge intensive business processes. It is strongly based on data as the typical product of these processes. Unlike workflow management, which uses predefined process control structures to determine what should be done during a workflow process, case handling focuses on what can be done to achieve a business goal. In case handling, the knowledge worker in charge of a particular case actively decides on how the goal of that case is reached, and the role of a case handling system is assisting rather than guiding her in doing so. In this paper, case handling is introduced as a new paradigm for supporting flexible business processes. It is motivated by comparing it to workflow management as the traditional way to support business processes. The main entities of case handling systems are identified and classified in a meta model. Finally, the basic functionality and usage of a case handling system is illustrated by an example.

The P2P Approach to Interorganizational Workflows

This paper describes in an informal way the Public-To-Private (P2P) approach to interorganizational workflows, which is based on a notion of inheritance. The approach consists of three steps: (1) create a common understanding of the interorganizational workflow by specifying a shared public workflow, (2) partition the public workflow over the organizations involved, and (3) for each organization, create a private workflow which is a subclass of the respective part of the public workflow. Using an example, we explain that the P2P approach yields an interorganizational workflow which is guaranteed to realize the behavior specified in the public workflow.

Efficient Compliance Checking Using BPMN-Q and Temporal Logic

Compliance rules describe regulations, policies and quality constraints business processes must adhere to. Given the large number of rules and their frequency of change, manual compliance checking can become a time-consuming task. Automated compliance checking of process activities and their ordering is an alternative whenever business processes and compliance rules are described in a formal way. This paper introduces an approach for automated compliance checking. Compliance rules are translated into temporal logic formulae that serve as input to model checkers which in turn verify whether a process model satisfies the requested compliance rule. To address the problem of state-space explosion we employ a set of reduction rules. The approach is prototypically realized and evaluated.

BPEL4Chor: Extending BPEL for Modeling Choreographies

The business process execution language (BPEL) is a language to orchestrate web services into a single business process. In a choreography view, several processes are interconnected and their interaction behavior is described from a global perspective. This paper shows how BPEL can be extended for defining choreographies. The proposed extensions (BPEL4Chor) distinguish between three aspects: (i) participant behavior descriptions, i.e. control flow dependencies in each participant, (ii) the participant topology, i.e. the existing participants and their interconnection using message links and (iii) participant groundings, i.e. concrete configurations for data formats and port types. As BPEL itself is used unchanged, the extensions facilitate a seamless integration between service choreographies and orchestrations. The suitability of the extensions is validated by assessing their support for the Service Interaction Patterns.

Advances in business process management

This special issue of Data & Knowledge Engineering contains extended versions of four papers selected from the best papers of the ‘‘International Conference on Business Process Management: On the Application of Formal Methods to Process-Aware Information Systems’’ that took place in Eindhoven (The Netherlands) in June 2003. To put the contributions to this special issue into a wider perspective, we first provide a brief overview of the scientific and practical issues in the context of Business Process Management (BPM) systems, followed by a brief introduction of the selected papers.

Formal foundation and conceptual design of dynamic adaptations in a workflow management system

While the different aspects of flexible workflow management are still under discussion, the ability to adapt the structure of running workflow instances to modified workflow schemas is an important property of a flexible workflow management system. In this paper, we present the formal foundation and conceptual design of dynamic adaptations in an object-oriented workflow management system. We describe in some detail how workflow schemas are represented. The system architecture, based on the CORBA object-oriented middleware, is overviewed, and the implementation of dynamic adaptations is sketched. An example introduces the graphical user interface of the system and shows a dynamic adaptation.

Using the π-calculus for formalizing workflow patterns

This paper discusses the application of a general process theory – the π-calculus – for describing the behavioral perspective of workflow. The π-calculus is a process algebra that describes mobile systems. Mobile systems are made up of components that communicate and change their structure as a result of communication. The ideas behind mobility, communication and change can also enrich the workflow domain, where flexibility and reaction to change are main drivers. However, it has not yet been evaluated whether the π-calculus is actually appropriate to represent the behavioral patterns of workflow. This paper investigates the issue and introduces a collection of workflow patterns formalizations, each with a sound formal definition and execution semantics. The formalizations can be used as a foundation for pattern-based workflow execution, reasoning, and simulation as well as a basis for future research on theoretical aspects of workflow.

Efficient Consistency Measurement Based on Behavioral Profiles of Process Models

Engineering of process-driven business applications can be supported by process modeling efforts in order to bridge the gap between business requirements and system specifications. However, diverging purposes of business process modeling initiatives have led to significant problems in aligning related models at different abstract levels and different perspectives. Checking the consistency of such corresponding models is a major challenge for process modeling theory and practice. In this paper, we take the inappropriateness of existing strict notions of behavioral equivalence as a starting point. Our contribution is a concept called behavioral profile that captures the essential behavioral constraints of a process model. We show that these profiles can be computed efficiently, i.e., in cubic time for sound free-choice Petri nets w.r.t. their number of places and transitions. We use behavioral profiles for the definition of a formal notion of consistency which is less sensitive to model projections than common criteria of behavioral equivalence and allows for quantifying deviation in a metric way. The derivation of behavioral profiles and the calculation of a degree of consistency have been implemented to demonstrate the applicability of our approach. We also report the findings from checking consistency between partially overlapping models of the SAP reference model.

Flexible modeling and execution of workflow activities

While todays workflow management systems are well suited for the controlled execution of completely specified processes, support for dynamically changing processes is rather weak. However, new applications in the business domain and in non-traditional domains like the natural sciences or laboratory environments require support for flexibility like user interventions in workflow executions and dynamic modifications. Based on an activity meta model and an activity instance model, the paper discusses dynamic modifications and user interventions and shows how their implications to activity models and to concurrent and future activity instances can be described. Finally, we show how the basic concepts presented in the paper are realized in a prototypical implementation.