Vera Künzle

PHILharmonicFlows: towards a framework for object-aware process management

Companies increasingly adopt process management systems (PrMS) that offer promising perspectives for more flexible and efficient process execution. However, there still exist many processes in practice which are not adequately supported by contemporary PrMS. We believe that a major reason for this deficiency stems from the unsatisfactory integration of processes and data in existing PrMS. Despite emerging approaches that address this integration, a unified and comprehensive understanding of object-awareness in connection with process management is still missing. To remedy this deficiency, we extensively analyzed various processes from different domains which are not adequately supported by existing PrMS. As a major insight we learned that in many cases comprehensive process support requires object-awareness. In particular, process support has to consider object behavior as well as object interactions, and should therefore be based on two levels of granularity. Besides this, object-awareness requires data-driven process execution and integrated access to processes and data. This paper presents the basic properties of object-aware processes as well as fundamental requirements for their operational support. It further introduces our PHILharmonicFlows framework which addresses these requirements and enables object-aware process management in a comprehensive manner. Finally, we evaluate this framework along several process scenarios. We believe that a holistic approach integrating data, processes and users offers promising perspectives in order to overcome the numerous limitations of contemporary PrMS. Copyright

Towards Object-Aware Process Management Systems: Issues, Challenges, Benefits

Contemporary workflow management systems (WfMS) offer promising perspectives in respect to comprehensive lifecycle support of business processes. However, there still exist numerous business applications with hard-coded process logic. Respective application software is both complex to design and costly to maintain. One major reason for the absence of workflow technology in these applications is the fact that many processes are data-driven; i.e., progress of process instances depends on value changes of data objects. Thus business processes and business data cannot be treated independently from each other, and business process models have to be compliant with the underlying data structure. This paper presents characteristic properties of data-oriented business software, which we gathered in several case studies, and it elaborates to what degree existing WfMS are able to provide the needed object-awareness. We show that the activity-centered paradigm of existing WfMS is too inflexible in this context, and we discuss major requirements needed to enable object-awareness in processes management systems.

Object-Aware Business Processes: Fundamental Requirements and their Support in Existing Approaches

Despite the increasing maturity of process management technology not all business processes are adequately supported by it. Support for unstructured and knowledge-intensive processes is missing, especially since they cannot be straight-jacketed into predefined activities. A common characteristic of these processes is the role of business objects and data as drivers for process modeling and enactment. This paper elicits fundamental requirements for effectively supporting such object-aware processes; i.e., their modeling, execution, and monitoring. Imperative, declarative, and data-driven process support approaches are evaluated and how well they support object-aware processes are investigated. A tight integration of process and data as major steps towards further maturation of process management technology is considered.

Integrating Users in Object-aware Process Management Systems: Issues and Challenges

Despite the increasing maturity of contemporary Workflow Management Systems (WfMS), there still exist numerous process-aware application systems with more or less hard-coded process logic. This does not only cause high maintenance efforts (e.g. costly code adaptions), but also results in hard-coded rules for controlling the access to business processes, business functions, and business data. In particular, the assignment of users to process activities needs to be compliant with the rights granted for executing business functions and for accessing business data. A major reason for not using WfMS in a broader context is the inflexibility provided by their activity-centered paradigm, which also limits the access control strategies offered by them. This position paper discusses key challenges for a process management technology in which processes, data objects and users are well integrated in order to ensure a sufficient degree of flexibility. We denote such technology as Object-Aware Process Management System and consider related research as fundamental for the further maturation of process management technology.

A Modeling Paradigm for Integrating Processes and Data at the Micro Level

Despite the widespread adoption of BPM, there exist many business processes not adequately supported by existing BPM technology. In previous work we reported on the properties of these processes. As a major insight we learned that, in accordance to the data model comprising object types and object relations, the modeling and execution of processes can be based on two levels of granularity: object behavior and object interactions. This paper focuses on micro processes capturing object behavior and constituting a fundamental pillar of our framework for object-aware process management. Our approach applies the well established concept of modeling object behavior in terms of states and state transitions. Opposed to existing work, we establish a mapping between attribute values and objects states to ensure compliance between them. Finally, we provide a well-defined operational semantics enabling the automatic and dynamic generation of most end-user components at run-time (e.g., overview tables and user forms).

Striving for Object-Aware Process Support: How Existing Approaches Fit Together

Many limitations of contemporary process management systems (PrMS) can be traced back to the missing integration of processes and data. A unified understanding of the inherent relationships existing between processes and data, however, is still missing. In the PHILharmonicFlows project we figured out that process support often requires object-awareness. This means, data must be manageable in terms of object types comprising object attributes and relations to other object types. In this paper, we systematically introduce the fundamental characteristics of object-aware processes. Further, we elaborate existing approaches recognizing the need for a tighter integration of processes and data along these characteristics. This way, we show the high relevance of the identified characteristics and confirm that their support is needed in many application domains.

Object-aware process management

Companies increasingly adopt process management systems (PrMS), which offer promising perspectives for a more flexible and efficient process execution. However, for many process-aware application systems (e.g., ERP or CRM systems), the underlying process logic is still hard-coded. As a consequence, these business applications are both complex to design and costly to maintain; i.e., they require long development cycles, and even simple process changes might result in costly code adaptions and high efforts for testing. One reason for this situation stems from the fact that contemporary PrMS were primarily designed for the support of highly structured, repetitive business processes. By contrast, many processes found in practice are rather unstructured or semi-structured, i.e., they are knowledge-intensive and driven by user decisions. In addition, the business functions to be integrated with these processes usually cannot be straight-jacketed into activities. For all these reasons, the activity-centered paradigm of contemporary PrMS is by far too inflexible for realizing more advanced business applications. This deficiency mainly stems from the unsatisfactory integration of processes and data in existing PrMS. Despite emerging approaches, which target at a tighter integration of process and data, a unified and comprehensive understanding of the relationships between them is still missing. This thesis first analyzes real processes not adequately supported by existing PrMS and elaborates their characteristic properties. As a major insight it became clear that in many application scenarios comprehensive process support requires both object- and process-awareness. This means, business processes and business data must not be treated independently from each other. Instead, business processes must comply with the underlying data structure. In particular, in accordance to the given data model comprising object types and object relations, the modeling, execution and monitoring of processes must be based on two levels of granularity: object behavior and object interactions. Further, the individual processes, coordinating the behavior of single object instances, must be coordinated with the ones of related object instances. Opposed to these well-defined process support granularity levels, activities must be executable at different levels of granularity. In particular, while a particular user may only want to work on a particular object instance, another one may want to process a number of related object instances in one go. Furthermore, process execution must be accomplished in a data-driven manner; i.e., the progress of a process instance mainly depends on available business objects and on value changes of their attributes. Finally, authorized users must be able to access and manage process-related objects at any point in time. Based on the properties identified, this thesis elaborates major requirements for enabling object-awareness in processes management systems. The major contribution of the thesis is the PHILharmonicFlows framework, which addresses these requirements and enables object-aware process management in a comprehensive manner. In particular, the framework not only provides a new process modeling approach, but also establishes a well-defined operational semantics enabling the automatic and dynamic generation of end-user components for object- and process-aware business applications at run-time (e.g., overview tables and user forms). Overall, a holistic framework integrating data, processes and users offers promising perspectives in order to overcome the numerous limitations of contemporary PrMS. This thesis considers research in this area as fundamental maturation of process management technology.

Integrated modeling of process- and data-centric software systems with PHILharmonicFlows

Process- and data-centric software systems require a tight integration of processes, functions, data, and users. Thereby, the behavioral perspective is described by process models, while the information perspective is captured in a data model. Eliciting and capturing requirements of such software systems in a consistent way is a challenging task, demanding that both process and data model are well aligned and consistent with each other. While traditional software modeling languages do not allow for an explicit integration of data and process models, activity-centric process modeling languages tend to neglect the role of data as a driver of process execution; i.e., business objects are usually outside the control of the process, normally stored in external databases. To overcome this drawback, PHILharmonicFlows provides a comprehensive framework for enabling object-aware process support. In addition, a sound specification of process- and object-centric software systems becomes possible. In this paper, we present a requirements modeling approach that provides methodological guidance for modeling large process-and data-centric software systems based on PHILharmonicFlows. Such guidance will foster the introduction of respective software systems in the large scale.

PHILharmonicFlows: Research and Design Methodology

In comprehensive case studies we found out that many limitations of existing Process Management Systems (PrMS) can be traced back to the unsatisfactory integration of processes and data. In the PHILharmonicFlows project, we aim at a deep and extensive understanding of the inherent relationships between processes and data, and thus want to overcome some of the fundamental limitations known from activity-centered PrMS. Overall, we target at a comprehensive framework providing integrated access to processes, data, and functions to its users.

Coordinating Business Processes Using Semantic Relationships

In enterprises, different business processes collaborate to achieve a common business goal. The processes involved in such a collaboration are connected to each other in one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many relationships. The complex interdependencies between these processes require proper process coordination. Current approaches addressing process coordination rely on message exchanges between the interacting processes with focus on syntax, while neglecting the semantics of these message exchanges between multiple processes. This paper introduces semantic relationships, a concept that provides the means to model process coordination based on message semantics, resulting in a high level of abstraction and thus facilitating process coordination. Semantic relationships incorporate the support for one-to-many and many-to-many process relations and affect process execution solely if required, allowing for concurrent and asynchronous process execution.