Applying Activity Patterns for Developing an Intelligent Process Modeling Tool

Due to their high level of abstraction and their reusability, workflow patterns are increasingly attracting the interest of both BPM researchers and BPM tool vendors. Frequently, process models can be assembled out of a set of recurrent business functions (e.g., task execution request, approval, notification), each of them having generic semantics that can be described as activity pattern. To our best knowledge, so far, there has been no extensive work implementing such activity patterns in a process modeling tool. In this paper we present an approach for modeling business processes and workflows. It is based on a suite which, when being implemented in a process modeling tool, allows to design business processes based on well-defined (process) activity patterns. Our suite further provides support for analysing and verifying certain properties of the composed process models (e.g., absence of deadlocks and livelocks). Finally, our approach considers both business processes designed from scratch and processes extracted from legacy systems

Activity Patterns in Process-aware Information Systems: Basic Concepts and Empirical Evidence

Recently, a variety of workflow patterns was suggested for capturing different aspects in process-aware information systems (PAISs) including control and data flow, resources, process change, and exception handling. All these patterns are highly relevant for implementing PAISs and for designing process modeling languages. However, current patterns provide only a partial answer to the question which business functions a designer might want to reuse when modeling processes. This paper presents a revised version of a collection of activity patterns to deal with this challenge. Each of them is related to a recurrent business function as it can be frequently found in process models (e.g., task execution request, notification, approval). We describe the identified activity patterns and their variants in detail. The main purpose of our paper is to discuss results from empirical studies, in which we analyzed more than 200 process models in order to evidence the practical relevance of the patterns. This includes a detailed analysis of the context in which activity patterns occur as well the frequency of this occurrence. These empirical findings can be used for the design of more intelligent, pattern-based process modeling tools