Rainer von Ammon

Integrating complex events for collaborating and dynamically changing business processes

Business processes must become agile, respond to changes in the business environment in a timely manner and quickly adapt themselves to new conditions. Event-Driven Business Process Management (ED-BPM) is an enhancement of Business Process Management (BPM) by concepts of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Complex Event Processing (CEP). The most important enhancement is the integration of services accessible via the Internet that fire events into global event clouds. The events can be processed by event processing platforms for aggregating the information into higher value complex business events. These events can be modeled in a business process execution language within a process driven Business Process Management System (BPMS) to trigger changes in control flow of a process or start other services. A reference model and a reference architecture for ED-BPM are presented, based on the NEXOF Reference Architecture. A taxonomy for classifying changes to process flow is proposed. Enhancements have to be applied to the existing standards in the BPM field, including both the design-time and the runtime. A scenario from the banking domain illustrates the main concepts and principles.

Identification of suspicious, unknown event patterns in an event cloud

This paper describes an approach to detect unknown event patterns. In this context, an event is not only something that happens, but also something that can be analysed. This task is processed by a Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine. CEP is an emerging technology for detecting known patterns of events and correlating them to complex events in real-time. In order to reach the goal of finding unknown patterns, several known detection algorithms are discussed. In our work, we focus on discriminant analysis used for recognizing unknown patterns for the use case of credit card transactions and the fraud problem connected with this kind of payment. It is necessary to develop new methods of fraud detection and prevention because of the negative impacts for vendors and customers caused by credit card fraudsters at present. At the same time we would like to make provisions for the more sophisticated fraud methods that will occur in the future.

Introduction to the Second International Workshop on Event-Driven Business Process Management (edBPM09)

The recently coined term «Event-Driven Business Process Management» (EDBPM) is nowadays an enhancement of BPM by new concepts of Service Oriented Architecture, Event Driven Architecture, Software as a Service, Business Activity Monitoring and Complex Event Processing (CEP). In this context BPM means a software platform which provides companies the ability to model, manage, and optimize these processes for significant gain. As an independent system, CEP is a parallel running platform that analyses and processes events. The BPM- and the CEP-platform correspond via events which are produced by the BPM-workflow engine and by the – if distributed - IT services which are associated with the business process steps. Also events coming from different event sources in different forms can trigger a business process or influence the execution of a process or a service, which can result in another event. Even more, the correlation of these events in a particular context can be treated as a complex, business level event, relevant for the execution of other business processes or services. A business process – arbitrarily fine or coarse grained – can be seen as a service again and can be “choreographed” with other business processes or services, even between different enterprises and organizations.