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Semantic annotation of business process model in the business process designs has been addressed in a large and growing body of work, but these annotations can be difficult and expensive to acquire. This paper presents a data-driven approach to mining and validating these annotations (and specifically context-independent semantic annotations). We leverage event objects in process execution histories which describe both activity execution events (typically represented as process events ) and state update events (represented as object state transition events ). We present an empirical evaluation, which suggests that the approach provides generally reliable results.

Business process modeling continues to increase in complexity, due, in part, to the dynamic business contexts and complicated domain concepts found in today's global economic environment. Although business process modeling is a critical step in workflow automation that powers business around the world, business process modelers often misunderstand domain concepts or relationships due to their lack of precise domain knowledge. Such semantic ambiguity affects the efficiency and quality of business process modeling. To address this problem, a Process Ontology Based Approach is proposed to ease semantic ambiguity by providing a means to capture rich, semantic information on complex business processes through domain specific ontologies. This approach is grounded in the Bunge-Shanks Framework to semantic disambiguation and evaluated using an expert survey as well as a controlled laboratory experiment.

The WWW is increasingly used for process-intensive business scenarios that connect services and applications together. Imperative programming and centralised traditional workflow engines lack the flexibility to support such distributed systems. RESTful business process (RESTfulBP) is an architectural style that introduces a set of constraints and uses process fragments to enable process coordination and choices at the endpoints to improve system adaptability, especially for human-intensive Web-based business processes. However, the original solution had two limitations: 1) the endpoint process fragments cannot distinguish between obligation and permission semantics to communicate richer choices of next-steps, and 2) it was time-consuming to create process fragment variants in an imperative style (either using complex workflow models or manually). In this paper, we propose a rule-based approach using the Role Network Model (RNM) to address these limitations. We introduce deontic logic into a process fragment and enable declarative generation of process fragments from rules. The proposed solution is evaluated in a real-world property valuation application using the B2B standard process from the Australian lending industry. The evaluation indicates that the new approach has improved both the design and runtime adaptability of the resulting system. Through surveys of other users employing our approach, it further demonstrates improved expressiveness, usability and general usefulness. Rule support for Web-based process fragments and orchestrationDeontic logic as indicators of obligations and permissions within process fragmentsImproved system adaption for Web-based business process orchestrationAutomatic generation of process fragments from process models and rules

To enable compliance checking on integrated business processes we developed the NTL-ALC logical framework, for closing the gap between the abstract norms and the concrete business processes. To reason on the active obligations and permissions, we extended the normative temporal logic NTL, by applying the deontic operators O (obligation) and P (permission) on concepts of the ALC (Attribute Language with Complements) description logic. As proof of concept of our results we have used the Hazard Analysis at Critical Control Points (HACCP) standard, aiming to prevent the occurrence of significant hazards in the food industry.

In order to be able to flexibly adjust a company's business processes (BPs) there is an increasing interest in flexible process-aware information systems (PAISs). This increasing flexibility, however, typically implies decreased user guidance by the PAIS and thus poses significant challenges to its users. As a major contribution of this work, we propose a recommendation system which assists users during process execution to optimize performance goals of the processes. The recommendation system is based on a constraint-based approach for planning and scheduling the BP activities and considers both the control-flow and the resource perspective. To evaluate the proposed constraint-based approach different algorithms are applied to a range of test models of varying complexity. The results indicate that, although the optimization of process execution is a highly constrained problem, the proposed approach produces a satisfactory number of suitable solutions.

A prominent goal of process mining is to build automatically a model explaining all the episodes recorded in the log of some transactional system. Whenever the process to be mined is complex and highly-flexible, however, equipping all the traces with just one model might lead to mixing different usage scenarios, thereby resulting in a spaghetti-like process description. This is, in fact, often circumvented by preliminarily applying clustering methods on the process log in order to identify all its hidden variants. In this paper, two relevant problems that arise in the context of applying such methods are addressed, which have received little attention so far: (i) making the clustering aware of outlier traces, and (ii) finding predictive models for clustering results. The first issue impacts on the effectiveness of clustering algorithms, which can indeed be led to confuse real process variants with exceptional behavior or malfunctions. The second issue instead concerns the opportunity of predicting the behavioral class of future process instances, by taking advantage of context-dependent ''non-structural'' data (e.g., activity executors, parameter values). The paper formalizes and analyzes these two issues and illustrates various mining algorithms to face them. All the algorithms have been implemented and integrated into a system prototype, which has been thoroughly validated over two real-life application scenarios.

Finding the case id in unlabeled event logs is arguably one of the hardest challenges in process mining research. While this problem has been addressed with greedy approaches, these usually converge to sub-optimal solutions. In this work, we describe an approach to perform complete search over the search space. We formulate the problem as a matter of finding the minimal set of patterns contained in a sequence, where patterns can be interleaved but do not have repeating symbols. This represents a new problem that has not been previously addressed in the literature, with NP-hard variants and conjectured NP-completeness. We solve it in a stepwise manner, by generating and verifying a list of candidate solutions. The techniques, introduced to address various subtasks, can be applied independently for solving more specific problems. The approach has been implemented and applied in a case study with real data from a business process supported in a software application.

International audience; The design of complex inter-enterprise business processes (IEBP) is generally performed in a modular way. Each process is designed separately and then the whole IEBP is obtained by omposition. Even if such a modular approach is intuitive and facilitates the design problem, it poses the problem that correct behavior of each business process of the IEBP taken alone does not guarantee a correct behavior of the composed IEBP (i.e.\ properties are not preserved by composition). Proving correctness of the (unknown) composed process is strongly related to the model checking problem of a system model. Among others, the symbolic observation graph based approach has proven to be very helpful for efficient model checking in general. Since it is heavily based on abstraction techniques and thus hides detailed information about system components that are not relevant for the correctness decision, it is promising to transfer this concept to the problem rised in this paper: How can the symbolic observation graph technique be adapted and employed for process composition? Answering this question is the aim of this paper.

We report on a case study on control-flow analysis of business process models. We checked 735 industrial business process models from financial services, telecommunications, and other domains. We investigated these models for soundness (absence of deadlock and lack of synchronization) using three different approaches: the business process verification tool Woflan, the Petri net model checker LoLA, and a recently developed technique based on SESE decomposition. We evaluate the various techniques used by these approaches in terms of their ability of accelerating the check. Our results show that industrial business process models can be checked in a few milliseconds, which enables tight integration of modeling with control-flow analysis. We also briefly compare the diagnostic information delivered by the different approaches and report some first insights from industrial applications. Keywords : Business Process Modeling; Quality assurance; Soundness; Verification; Control-flow analysis

Process mining is helpful for deploying new business processes as well as auditing, analyzing and improving the already enacted ones. Most of the existing process mining algorithms have some problems in dealing with invisible tasks, i.e., such tasks that exist in a process model but not in its event log. In this paper, a new process mining algorithm named a# is proposed, which extends the mining capability of the classical a algorithm by supporting the detection of prime invisible tasks from event logs. Prime invisible tasks are divided into five types according to their structural features, i.e., INITIALIZE, SKIP, REDO, SWITCH and FINALIZE. After that, a new ordering relation for detecting mendacious dependencies between tasks that reflects prime invisible tasks is introduced. A reduction rule for identifying redundant "mendacious" dependencies is also considered. The construction algorithm to insert prime invisible tasks of SKIP/REDO/SWITCH types is presented. The a# algorithm has been evaluated using both artificial and real-life logs and the results are promising. Keywords: Workflow log; Process mining; Invisible tasks; Petri nets.

Variance in business process execution can be the result of several situations, such as disconnection between documented models and business operations, workarounds in spite of process execution engines, dynamic change and exception handling, flexible and ad-hoc requirements, and collaborative and/or knowledge intensive work. It is imperative that effective support for managing process variances be extended to organizations mature in their BPM (business process management) uptake so that they can ensure organization wide consistency, promote reuse and capitalize on their BPM investments. This paper presents an approach for managing business processes that is conducive to dynamic change and the need for flexibility in execution. The approach is based on the notion of process constraints. It further provides a technique for effective utilization of the adaptations manifested in process variants. In particular, we will present a facility for discovery of preferred variants through effective search and retrieval based on the notion of process similarity, where multiple aspects of the process variants are compared according to specific query requirements. The advantage of this approach is the ability to provide a quantitative measure for the similarity between process variants, which further facilitates various BPM activities such as process reuse, analysis and discovery.

BPTrigger is a process-oriented trigger model that provides economy of specification and efficient execution for complex business constraints. An essential part of trigger execution is detection and resolution of cycles. This paper presents an approach to determine the terminability of a cycle introduced by a BPTrigger in a business process and determine whether a cycle is allowable in terms of compensatibility. The foundation of the approach is a set of conditions for cycle termination derived from classifications of business processes by resource usage and activity types by compensation status. This paper formally presents cycle analysis procedures using the notion of cycle analysis graph. Further, a procedure is proposed which checks the terminability of multiple cycles using a composite cycle analysis graph constructed from the cycle analysis graphs of the associated cycles. The paper proves the correctness of the analysis and presents a validation example. The presented results extend some limitations of well-formed sphere which has addressed atomicity of workflow transactions.

To enable effective cross-organizational collaborations, process providers have to offer external views on their internal processes to their partners. A process view hides details of an internal process that are secret to or irrelevant for the partners. This paper describes a formal two-step approach for constructing customized process views on structured process models. First, a non-customized process view is constructed from an internal structured process model by aggregating internal activities the provider wishes to hide. Second, a customized process view is constructed by hiding and omitting activities from the non-customized view that are not requested by the process consumer. The feasibility of the approach is shown by means of a case study.

A product model is a formal and structured definition of product information. The most common procedure for defining a product data model is to first describe the business and/or engineering process in a formal process model, then to create a product data model based on the process model. However, there is a logical gap between process modeling and product modeling methods in the current ISO 10303 standard product modeling process. We propose a new formal approach, called Process to Product Modeling (PPM) in which process and product modeling can be logically linked. This paper focuses on the semantics and syntax for the Requirements Collection and Modeling (RCM) of PPM. The new RCM method aims to model heterogeneous business processes and their information flows. The major difference between the proposed method and traditional requirements collection methods is that it provides a theoretical linkage to integrate process models and a set of specific information items used in them. This theoretical linkage enables modelers to capture the contents, scope, granularity, and semantics of information used in activities, which are depicted in process models. A PPM method, called Georgia Tech Process to Product Modeling (GTPPM), has been developed and was deployed for the North American Precast Concrete Software Consortium; examples from this effort are presented. Experience to date indicates that the new RCM method and the GTPPM tool hold the potential to improve and expedite elicitation of information for product model development.

A web service choreography standard enables a standardized description of business processes that allows not only a clear specification of the control flow, but also forms the basis for the actual process execution. Such standards are part of the web services stack and facilitate enterprise systems interoperability. A simple indication of the rapid growth of this area is the number of new and existing standards. However, while the list of standards is expanding, there is an obvious lack of sound theoretical evaluation and comparison of these standards. To provide a basis for this theoretical evaluation and comparison, we use the well-established Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) models, in particular the representation model. We, and other researchers, have shown the usefulness of the BWW representation model for analyzing, evaluating, and engineering techniques in the areas of traditional and structured systems analysis, object-oriented modeling, and process modeling. In this paper, we present the BWW ontological analysis of four dominating candidate interoperability standards; ebXML Business Process Specification Schema BPSS (v1.01), the Business Process Modeling Language BPML (v1.0), the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services BPEL4WS (v1.1) and the Web Service Choreography Interface WSCI (v.1.0). The application of the BWW representation model and the overlap analysis across the four standards has resulted in several interesting findings. First, we have identified a set of ontological constructs for which representations are missing in each of the standards. This situation has allowed us to generate a number of propositions as to the potential weaknesses of the standards in general. Second, the analysis has shown that ebXML BPSS is a ''clear winner'' with respect to the ontological expressiveness and the maturity of the specification. Furthermore, the analysis has also allowed us to identify two sets of standards viz. ebXML BPSS and BPEL4WS, ebXML BPSS and WSCI, that, when used together, provide the user with the largest available set of meaningful constructs required to implement systems interoperability. Finally, the analysis explains which standards are complementary to each other and which standards are in fact competing standards.

Business Process Management (BPM) includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. This special issue presents papers, which contribute to the state of the art of BPM, and should be considered as a spin-off of the successful 2005 edition of the International Conference on Business Process Management. In this guest editorial we introduce the four papers in this special issue and comment on recent developments in the broader BPM domain.

Much research has been devoted over the years to investigating and advancing the techniques and tools used by analysts when they model. As opposed to what academics, software providers and their resellers promote as should be happening, the aim of this research was to determine whether practitioners still embraced conceptual modeling seriously. In addition, what are the most popular techniques and tools used for conceptual modeling? What are the major purposes for which conceptual modeling is used? The study found that the top six most frequently used modeling techniques and methods were ER diagramming, data flow diagramming, systems flowcharting, workflow modeling, UML, and structured charts. Modeling technique use was found to decrease significantly from smaller to medium-sized organizations, but then to increase significantly in larger organizations (proxying for large, complex projects). Technique use was also found to significantly follow an inverted U-shaped curve, contrary to some prior explanations. Additionally, an important contribution of this study was the identification of the factors that uniquely influence the decision of analysts to continue to use modeling, viz., communication (using diagrams) to/from stakeholders, internal knowledge (lack of) of techniques, user expectations management, understanding models' integration into the business, and tool/software deficiencies. The highest ranked purposes for which modeling was undertaken were database design and management, business process documentation, business process improvement, and software development.

BPMS (Business Process Management Systems) is a revolutionary information system that supports designing, administrating, and improving the business processes systematically. BPMS enables the execution of business processes by assigning tasks to human or computer agents according to the predefined definitions of the processes. In this paper, we devise process execution rules using individual worklists and propose task assignment algorithms to maximize the overall process efficiency under the limitation of the agent's capacity. We first transform the business processes into queueing network models, in which the agents are considered as servers. With this step complete, workloads of agents are calculated from server utilization and the task assignment policy can be determined by balancing the workloads. This will serve to minimize the workloads of all agents, thus achieving overall process efficiency. Another application of these results can be capacity planning of agents in advance and business process optimization in the reengineering context. The simulation results and comparisons with other well-known dispatching policies with the shared worklists show the effectiveness of our algorithm.

Text documents are a valuable resource for virtually any enterprise and organization, and in many cases, document processing is a highly collaborative process. Thus documents have to be stored, managed and handled with the utmost care and efficiency.Strangely enough, while other data (most prominently customer, product, finance, and the like) have long been supported by sophisticated database and workflow technologies, until now, documents have typically been treated as second-class citizens, where mostly ad-hoc, home-grown, and often intricate solutions are being used.As a consequence, many of the achievements (with respect to data organization and querying, recovery, integrity and security enforcement, multi-user operation, distribution management, uniform tool access, and similar) are not easily available for documents.We propose a radically different approach, centered on natively representing text in fully-fledged databases, and incorporating all necessary collaboration support.This paper presents the overall concept and details of the approach's implementation. It also shows that such an approach--against first-glance scepticism, something often used as a killer argument--is indeed feasible with respect to efficiency.

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 indiGo project offers a solution for tackling resistance against and problems while executing process models: eParticipative Process Learning. Via moderated, web-based discussions, consensus about a process is created and process models are reviewed to achieve better understandability or other quality aspects. Furthermore, problems during the execution of a process are solved collaboratively and captured as lessons learned to facilitate upcoming process executions. In this paper, we present the method and technical infrastructure to support eParticipative Process Learning. To show that eParticipative Process Learning leads to improved and accepted process models, three case studies are described.

Interconnecting business processes across systems and organisations is considered to provide significant benefits, such as greater process transparency, higher degrees of integration, facilitation of communication, and consequently higher throughput in a given time interval. However, to achieve these benefits requires tackling constraints. In the context of this paper these are privacy-requirements of the involved workflows and their mutual dependencies. Workflow views are a promising conceptional approach to address the issue of privacy; however this approach requires addressing the issue of interdependencies between workflow view and adjacent private workflow. In this paper we focus on three aspects concerning the support for execution of cross-organisational workflows that have been modelled with a workflow view approach: (i) communication between the entities of a view-based workflow model, (ii) their impact on an extended workflow engine, and (iii) the design of a cross-organisational workflow architecture (CWA). We consider communication aspects in terms of state dependencies and control flow dependencies. We propose to tightly couple private workflow and workflow view with state dependencies, whilst to loosely couple workflow views with control flow dependencies. We introduce a Petri-Net-based state transition approach that binds states of private workflow tasks to their adjacent workflow view-task. On the basis of these communication aspects we develop a CWA for view-based cross-organisational workflow execution. Its concepts are valid for mediated and unmediated interactions and express no choice of a particular technology. The concepts are demonstrated by a scenario, run by two extended workflow management systems.

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.

In order to perform business modelling as apart of information systems development, there is a need for frameworks and methods. The paper proposes a framework for business interaction based on a language/ action perspective. The framework is an architecture of five generic layers. The first layer concept is 'business act', which functions as the basic unit of analysis. The following four layer concepts are 'action pair', 'exchange', 'business transaction', and 'transaction group'. The framework is inspired by a similar framework constructed by Weigand et al. The paper makes a critical examination of this framework as a basis for the proposed framework.

The increasing demands concerning the modifiability and connectivity of business processes cannot be met adequately anymore by relying on best practices only. There is an urgent need for a reference conceptual framework for studying, modeling, analyzing and designing business processes. The Language-Action Perspective (LAP), in particular Habermas' theory of Communicative Action offers a sound and rigid foundation for such a framework. In this paper, the DEMO (Demo Engineering Methodology for Organizations)-framework is presented. It builds on the LAP-based theoretical foundation of the DEMO methodology. Several other LAP-based frameworks have been proposed in the past years. They are evaluated in a comparative review with the DEMO-framework. Several shortcomings of these frameworks are revealed and discussed. The practical applicability of the DEMO-framework is demonstrated using a small example.

We present a flexible framework that enables workflow systems to adapt to changing conditions. The model is designed to reveal key aspects of the tasks involved in representing and enacting business processes. These fundamental characteristics are identified as state, behaviour, distribution, coordination and enactment. By isolating such core concepts in a way that allows them to be varied, we open up the general process of task coordination and execution, allowing for extensions in a planned way. By suitable manipulation of each of these aspects, at the appropriate level, a workflow system may be extensively modified in a way that minimises the effect of such change upon other aspects of the system.

Most private and public organizations have recently turned their attention to the process by which they operate, to improve service and product quality and customer satisfaction. To support business process reengineering, methods and tools for process modeling and analysis are required. The paper presents the ARTEMIS methodology and associated tool environment for business process analysis for reengineering. In the ARTEMIS methodological framework, business processes are modeled as workflows and are analyzed according to an organizational structure perspective and an operational structure perspective. With these two perspectives, the analyst can plan reengineering interventions based on the degree of autonomy/dependency of organization units in terms of coupling, and the inter-process semantic correspondences, in terms of data and operation similarity, respectively. The ARTEMIS methodology and associated tool environment have been conceived and applied in the framework of the PROGRESS research project. In the paper, we report on a reengineering case study of this project involving the Italian Ministry of Justice.

As organizations move from hierarchical towards market-like structures, their distributed units also take a larger role in the design and evolution of organizational information systems. This requires strategies which support the cooperative creation, evaluation and evolution of global information flow structures among autonomous organizational units through local knowledge acquisition and maintenance. Three such strategies are presented: cooperative conceptual modeling, multi-simulation, and explicit process support. These strategies are formally embedded in a meta modeling framework and implemented with a repository-based architecture. They are intended for the analysis of business processes in networked organizations, and as a basis for designing and evolving their federated information systems.

Tremendous developments in data storing, processing and communication over the last two decades have made unprecedented impact on how most enterprises operate, develop future business strategies and deal with day to day operations. Businesses are increasingly moving towards extensive automation of their private and public processes. This automation takes the form of complex interactions between heterogeneous and autonomous systems within the enterprise and often cross multiple organizations. Controlling these complex interactions in order to effectively manage collaborative business processes is known to be a critical yet difficult problem using current technology solutions. Consequently, the areas of research are multi-faceted ranging from security, reliability and transactional support, quality of service guarantees, process validation and optimisation, to data modelling, repository management, and semantic integrity of terminology used. Workflow Management Systems delivered effectively in the area of process enforcement, offering a clear separation of business process logic from component applications involved in process execution, thereby responding to the well-established need for application integration. The complementary role of workflow systems in supporting advanced database functions, offered a powerful environment for information systems architects. It is an observed phenomenon that a new IT solution often triggers additional, and even more advanced user requirements, which probably would not be discovered if the current systems functionality would not be so widely available. This pattern can be clearly observed in the context of workflow technology evolution. It is time now for an even more advanced and rich level of integration facilities. It should be possible to form new business processes out of pre-existing fully operational workflows at different sites for various business partners with process owner controlled levels of data disclosure, and