Providing Integrated Life Cycle Support in Process-Aware Information Systems

The need for more flexibility of process-aware information systems (PAISs) has been discussed for several years and different approaches for adaptive process management have emerged. However, only few of them provide support for both changes of individual process instances and the propagation of process type changes to a collection of related process instances. Furthermore, knowledge about process changes has not yet been exploited by any of these systems. This paper presents the ProCycle approach which overcomes this practical limitation by capturing the whole process life cycle and all kinds of changes in an integrated way. Users are not only allowed to deviate from the predefined process in exceptional situations, but are also assisted in retrieving and reusing knowledge about previously performed changes in this context. If similar instance deviations occur frequently, process engineers will be supported in deriving improved process models from them. This, in turn, allows engineers to evolve the PAIS (including the knowledge about the changes) over time. Feasability of the ProCycle approach is demonstrated by a proof-of-concept prototype which combines adaptive process management technology with concepts and methods provided by case-based reasoning (CBR) technology

Service discovery and composition : PreDiCtS approach

The proliferation of Web Services is fostering the need for service-discovery and composition tools to provide more personalisation during the service retrieval process. In this paper, we describe the motivating details behind PreDiCtS, a framework for personalised service-retrieval. In our approach we consider that similar service composition problems can be tackled in a similar manner by reusing and adapting past composition best practices or templates. The proposed retrieval process uses a mixed- initiative technique based on Conversational Case-Based Reasoning (CCBR), that provides i) for a clearer identification of the user’s service requirements and ii) based on these requirements, finds suitable service templates that satisfy the user’s goal. We discuss how retrieval can vary through the use of different CCBR algorithms and how adaptation can be performed over the retrieved templates thus providing the personalisation feature in PreDiCtS.peer-reviewe

Preferences in Case-Based Reasoning

Case-based reasoning (CBR) is a well-established problem solving paradigm that has been used in a wide range of real-world applications. Despite its great practical success, work on the theoretical foundations of CBR is still under way, and a coherent and universally applicable methodological framework is yet missing. The absence of such a framework inspired the motivation for the work developed in this thesis. Drawing on recent research on preference handling in Artificial Intelligence and related fields, the goal of this work is to develop a well theoretically-founded framework on the basis of formal concepts and methods for knowledge representation and reasoning with preferences

ProCycle - Integrierte Unterstützung des Prozesslebenszyklus

Aufgrund häufiger Änderungen in ihrem Geschäftsumfeld müssen Unternehmen in der Lage sein, ihre Geschäftsprozesse und die sie unterstützenden Informationssysteme (IS) rasch und flexibel anzupassen. In jüngerer Vergangenheit ist eine neue Generation von IS entstanden, die eine umfassende IT-Unterstützung für Prozesse zum Ziel haben. Diese Systeme haben sich jedoch in der Praxis oftmals als zu starr erwiesen. Um wirklich breit einsetzbar zu sein, muss es auch möglich sein, in Ausnahmefällen flexibel vom definierten Prozess abzuweichen sowie Prozessimplementierungen rasch an sich ändernde Rahmenbedingungen, wie beispielsweise neue gesetzliche Anforderungen, anzupassen. Das prozess- orientierte IS sollte den Benutzer im Änderungsfall durch die Wiederverwendung von Änderungen unterstützen sowie den Prozessverantwortlichen bei der Ableitung von verbesserten Prozessmodellen helfen. Dieser Beitrag stellt mit ProCycle einen implementierten Ansatz vor, der all diese Funktionalitäten bietet und der aus der Integration adaptiver Prozess-Management-Technologie mit Techniken des Case-Based Reasoning hervorgegangen ist. Ziel ist es, den kompletten Prozesslebenszyklus in integrierter Form zu unterstützen

Issues in Process Variants Mining

In today's dynamic business world economic success of an enterprise increasingly depends on its ability to react to internal and external changes in a quick and flexible way. In response to this need, process-aware information systems (PAIS) emerged, which support the modeling, orchestration and monitoring of business processes and services respectively. Recently, a new generation of flexible PAIS was introduced, which additionally allows for dynamic process and service changes. This, in turn, will lead to a large number of process variants, which are created from the same original process model, but might slightly differ from each other. This paper deals with issues related to the mining of such process variant collections. Our overall goal is to learn from process changes and to merge the resulting model variants into a generic process model in the best possible way. By adopting this generic process model in the PAIS, future cost of process change and need for process adaptations will decrease. Finally, we compare our approach with existing process mining techniques, and show that process variants mining is additionally needed to learn from process changes

Change Support in Process-Aware Information Systems - A Pattern-Based Analysis

In today's dynamic business world the economic success of an enterprise increasingly depends on its ability to react to changes in its environment in a quick and flexible way. Process-aware information systems (PAIS) offer promising perspectives in this respect and are increasingly employed for operationally supporting business processes. To provide effective business process support, flexible PAIS are needed which do not freeze existing business processes, but allow for loosely specified processes, which can be detailed during run-time. In addition, PAIS should enable authorized users to flexibly deviate from the predefined processes if required (e.g., by allowing them to dynamically add, delete, or move process activities) and to evolve business processes over time. At the same time PAIS must ensure consistency and robustness. The emergence of different process support paradigms and the lack of methods for comparing existing change approaches have made it difficult for PAIS engineers to choose the adequate technology. In this paper we suggest a set of changes patterns and change support features to foster the systematic comparison of existing process management technology with respect to process change support. Based on these change patterns and features, we provide a detailed analysis and evaluation of selected systems from both academia and industry. The identified change patterns and change support features facilitate the comparison of change support frameworks, and consequently will support PAIS engineers in selecting the right technology for realizing flexible PAIS. In addition, this work can be used as a reference for implementing more flexible PAIS