Process Mining as a Strategy of Inquiry: Understanding Design Interventions and the Development of Business Processes

Process (re-)design and improvement are important aspectsof the Business Process Management (BPM) life-cycle. Yet, there is lit-tle empirical evidence on how design interventions materialize in actualprocess execution, leading to repeated failure of such initiatives. In thisdissertation I use the emerging affordances of process mining algorithmsto address this important limitation. In particular, I devise a methodthat combines process mining and grounded theory to study processualphenomena. Consequently, this method is applied to investigate changein business processes. This thesis contributes to the body of knowledgein BPM and bordering disciplines by demonstrating how process min-ing can be used as a method to study processual phenomena. Furtherthis research sheds light on the impact of design interventions on actualprocess execution and vica versa

Notes on the applicability of contraction method for stable limit laws

We presented a proof for the classical stable limit laws under use of contraction method in combination with the Zolotarev metric. Furthermore, a stable limit law was proved for scaled sums of growing into sequences. This limit law was alternatively formulated for sequences of random variables defined by a simple degenerate recursion

A fully-coupled discontinuous Galerkin method for two-phase flow in porous media with discontinuous capillary pressure

In this paper we formulate and test numerically a fully-coupled discontinuous Galerkin (DG) method for incompressible two-phase flow with discontinuous capillary pressure. The spatial discretization uses the symmetric interior penalty DG formulation with weighted averages and is based on a wetting-phase potential / capillary potential formulation of the two-phase flow system. After discretizing in time with diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta schemes the resulting systems of nonlinear algebraic equations are solved with Newton's method and the arising systems of linear equations are solved efficiently and in parallel with an algebraic multigrid method. The new scheme is investigated for various test problems from the literature and is also compared to a cell-centered finite volume scheme in terms of accuracy and time to solution. We find that the method is accurate, robust and efficient. In particular no post-processing of the DG velocity field is necessary in contrast to results reported by several authors for decoupled schemes. Moreover, the solver scales well in parallel and three-dimensional problems with up to nearly 100 million degrees of freedom per time step have been computed on 1000 processors

Young Massive Clusters: Their Population Properties, Formation and Evolution, and Their Relation to the Ancient Globular Clusters

This review summarises the main properties of Young Massive Clusters (YMCs), including their population properties, particularly focusing on extragalactic cluster samples. We discuss potential biases and caveats that can affect the construction of cluster samples and how incompleteness effects can result in erroneous conclusions regarding the long term survival of clusters. In addition to the luminosity, mass and age distributions of the clusters, we discuss the size distribution and profile evolution of the clusters. We also briefly discuss the stellar populations within YMCs. The final part of the review focusses on the connections between YMCs and the ancient globular clusters, whether or not they are related objects and how we can use what we know about YMC formation and evolution to understand how GCs formed in the early universe and how they relate to galaxy formation/evolution.Comment: 33 pages. To appear in EES2015 - Stellar Clusters: benchmarks of stellar physics and galactic evolution - eds. E. Moraux, Y. Lebreton and C. Charbonne