The Internet-of-Things Meets Business Process Management: Mutual Benefits and Challenges

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected devices collecting and exchanging data over the Internet. These things can be artificial or natural, and interact as autonomous agents forming a complex system. In turn, Business Process Management (BPM) was established to analyze, discover, design, implement, execute, monitor and evolve collaborative business processes within and across organizations. While the IoT and BPM have been regarded as separate topics in research and practice, we strongly believe that the management of IoT applications will strongly benefit from BPM concepts, methods and technologies on the one hand; on the other one, the IoT poses challenges that will require enhancements and extensions of the current state-of-the-art in the BPM field. In this paper, we question to what extent these two paradigms can be combined and we discuss the emerging challenges

Using Work System Theory to Link Managerial and Technical Perspectives on BPM

Work system theory (WST) provides a bridge between managerial and technical perspectives on BPM that often seem distant from each other. In combination, the work system framework, underlying work system metamodel, and the work system life cycle model provide a number of bridges between those perspectives. In relation to managerial BPM, the work system framework treats business process as one of nine elements in a basic understanding of a work system. The others are participants, information, technology, products/services, customers, environment, infrastructure, and strategies. The underlying metamodel outlines a precise structure for analysis and design of work systems and for links to technical aspects of BPM. It provides details that are omitted from the work system framework, which has proven useful for initial high level summaries but is not granular enough to support detailed design and documentation. The work system life cycle model combines planned and unplanned (emergent) change through which work systems evolve. This paper explains where WST fits in the general realm of BPM-related topics and how WST might help in developing BPM further. It also identifies challenges and next steps related to using WST to expand the scope of BPM

Business Process Management Education in Academia: Status, challenges, and Recommendations

In response to the growing proliferation of Business Process Management (BPM) in industry and the demand this creates for BPM expertise, universities across the globe are at various stages of incorporating knowledge and skills in their teaching offerings. However, there are still only a handful of institutions that offer specialized education in BPM in a systematic and in-depth manner. This article is based on a global educators’ panel discussion held at the 2009 European Conference on Information Systems in Verona, Italy. The article presents the BPM programs of five universities from Australia, Europe, Africa, and North America, describing the BPM content covered, program and course structures, and challenges and lessons learned. The article also provides a comparative content analysis of BPM education programs illustrating a heterogeneous view of BPM. The examples presented demonstrate how different courses and programs can be developed to meet the educational goals of a university department, program, or school. This article contributes insights on how best to continuously sustain and reshape BPM education to ensure it remains dynamic, responsive, and sustainable in light of the evolving and ever-changing marketplace demands for BPM expertise

Role and task recommendation and social tagging to enable social business process management

Traditional Business Process Management (BPM) poses a number of limitations for the management of ad-hoc processes, where the execution paths are not designed a priori and evolve during enactment. Social BPM, which predicates to integrate social software into the BPM lifecycle, has emerged as an answer to such limitations. This paper presents a framework for social BPM in which social tagging is used to capture process knowledge emerging during the enactment and design of the processes. Process knowledge concerns both the type of activities chosen to fulfil a certain goal and the skills and experience of users in executing specific tasks. Such knowledge is exploited by recommendation tools to support the design and enactment of future process instances. We first provide an overview of our framework, introducing the concepts of role and task recommendations, which are supported by social tagging. These mechanisms are then elaborated further by an example. Eventually, we discuss a prototype of our framework enabling collaborative process design and execution

What Role Can Process Mining Play in Recurrent Clinical Guidelines Issues? A Position Paper

[EN] In the age of Evidence-Based Medicine, Clinical Guidelines (CGs) are recognized to be an indispensable tool to support physicians in their daily clinical practice. Medical Informatics is expected to play a relevant role in facilitating diffusion and adoption of CGs. However, the past pioneering approaches, often fragmented in many disciplines, did not lead to solutions that are actually exploited in hospitals. Process Mining for Healthcare (PM4HC) is an emerging discipline gaining the interest of healthcare experts, and seems able to deal with many important issues in representing CGs. In this position paper, we briefly describe the story and the state-of-the-art of CGs, and the efforts and results of the past approaches of medical informatics. Then, we describe PM4HC, and we answer questions like how can PM4HC cope with this challenge? Which role does PM4HC play and which rules should be employed for the PM4HC scientific community?Gatta, R.; Vallati, M.; Fernández Llatas, C.; Martinez-Millana, A.; Orini, S.; Sacchi, L.; Lenkowicz, J.... (2020). What Role Can Process Mining Play in Recurrent Clinical Guidelines Issues? A Position Paper. International Journal of Environmental research and Public Health (Online). 17(18):1-19. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17186616S1191718Guyatt, G. (1992). Evidence-Based Medicine. JAMA, 268(17), 2420. doi:10.1001/jama.1992.03490170092032Hripcsak, G., Ludemann, P., Pryor, T. A., Wigertz, O. B., & Clayton, P. D. (1994). Rationale for the Arden Syntax. Computers and Biomedical Research, 27(4), 291-324. doi:10.1006/cbmr.1994.1023Peleg, M. (2013). Computer-interpretable clinical guidelines: A methodological review. 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Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 78, 134-143. doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2017.12.005Garcia, C. dos S., Meincheim, A., Faria Junior, E. R., Dallagassa, M. R., Sato, D. M. V., Carvalho, D. R., … Scalabrin, E. E. (2019). Process mining techniques and applications – A systematic mapping study. Expert Systems with Applications, 133, 260-295. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2019.05.003Bhargava, A., Kim, T., Quine, D. B., & Hauser, R. G. (2019). A 20-Year Evaluation of LOINC in the United States’ Largest Integrated Health System. Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine, 144(4), 478-484. doi:10.5858/arpa.2019-0055-oaLee, D., de Keizer, N., Lau, F., & Cornet, R. (2014). Literature review of SNOMED CT use. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 21(e1), e11-e19. doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2013-001636TROTTI, A., COLEVAS, A., SETSER, A., RUSCH, V., JAQUES, D., BUDACH, V., … COLEMAN, C. (2003). CTCAE v3.0: development of a comprehensive grading system for the adverse effects of cancer treatment. 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Journal of Cystic Fibrosis, 13(5), 495-498. doi:10.1016/j.jcf.2014.06.012Clinical Practical Guidelineshttp://www.openclinical.org/guidelines.htmlHaynes, A. B., Weiser, T. G., Berry, W. R., Lipsitz, S. R., Breizat, A.-H. S., Dellinger, E. P., … Gawande, A. A. (2009). A Surgical Safety Checklist to Reduce Morbidity and Mortality in a Global Population. New England Journal of Medicine, 360(5), 491-499. doi:10.1056/nejmsa0810119Grigg, E. (2015). Smarter Clinical Checklists. Anesthesia & Analgesia, 121(2), 570-573. doi:10.1213/ane.0000000000000352Hales, B., Terblanche, M., Fowler, R., & Sibbald, W. (2007). Development of medical checklists for improved quality of patient care. International Journal for Quality in Health Care, 20(1), 22-30. doi:10.1093/intqhc/mzm062Greenfield, S. (2017). Clinical Practice Guidelines. JAMA, 317(6), 594. doi:10.1001/jama.2016.19969Vegting, I. L., van Beneden, M., Kramer, M. H. H., Thijs, A., Kostense, P. J., & Nanayakkara, P. W. B. (2012). How to save costs by reducing unnecessary testing: Lean thinking in clinical practice. European Journal of Internal Medicine, 23(1), 70-75. doi:10.1016/j.ejim.2011.07.003Drummond, M. (2016). Clinical Guidelines: A NICE Way to Introduce Cost-Effectiveness Considerations? Value in Health, 19(5), 525-530. doi:10.1016/j.jval.2016.04.020Prior, M., Guerin, M., & Grimmer-Somers, K. (2008). The effectiveness of clinical guideline implementation strategies - a synthesis of systematic review findings. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 14(5), 888-897. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2753.2008.01014.xWatts, C. G., Dieng, M., Morton, R. L., Mann, G. J., Menzies, S. W., & Cust, A. E. (2014). Clinical practice guidelines for identification, screening and follow-up of individuals at high risk of primary cutaneous melanoma: a systematic review. British Journal of Dermatology, 172(1), 33-47. doi:10.1111/bjd.13403Woolf, S., Schünemann, H. J., Eccles, M. P., Grimshaw, J. M., & Shekelle, P. (2012). Developing clinical practice guidelines: types of evidence and outcomes; values and economics, synthesis, grading, and presentation and deriving recommendations. Implementation Science, 7(1). doi:10.1186/1748-5908-7-61Legido-Quigley, H., Panteli, D., Brusamento, S., Knai, C., Saliba, V., Turk, E., … Busse, R. (2012). Clinical guidelines in the European Union: Mapping the regulatory basis, development, quality control, implementation and evaluation across member states. Health Policy, 107(2-3), 146-156. doi:10.1016/j.healthpol.2012.08.004Rashidian, A., Eccles, M. P., & Russell, I. (2008). Falling on stony ground? A qualitative study of implementation of clinical guidelines’ prescribing recommendations in primary care. Health Policy, 85(2), 148-161. doi:10.1016/j.healthpol.2007.07.011Yang, W.-S., & Hwang, S.-Y. (2006). A process-mining framework for the detection of healthcare fraud and abuse. Expert Systems with Applications, 31(1), 56-68. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2005.09.003Kose, I., Gokturk, M., & Kilic, K. (2015). An interactive machine-learning-based electronic fraud and abuse detection system in healthcare insurance. Applied Soft Computing, 36, 283-299. doi:10.1016/j.asoc.2015.07.018Pryor, T. A., Gardner, R. M., Clayton, P. D., & Warner, H. R. (1983). The HELP system. Journal of Medical Systems, 7(2), 87-102. doi:10.1007/bf00995116Shahar, Y., Miksch, S., & Johnson, P. (1998). The Asgaard project: a task-specific framework for the application and critiquing of time-oriented clinical guidelines. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 14(1-2), 29-51. doi:10.1016/s0933-3657(98)00015-3Boxwala, A. A., Peleg, M., Tu, S., Ogunyemi, O., Zeng, Q. T., Wang, D., … Shortliffe, E. H. (2004). GLIF3: a representation format for sharable computer-interpretable clinical practice guidelines. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 37(3), 147-161. doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2004.04.002Terenziani, P., Molino, G., & Torchio, M. (2001). A modular approach for representing and executing clinical guidelines. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 23(3), 249-276. doi:10.1016/s0933-3657(01)00087-2Sutton, D. R., & Fox, J. (2003). The Syntax and Semantics of the PROformaGuideline Modeling Language. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 10(5), 433-443. doi:10.1197/jamia.m1264Musen, M. A., Tu, S. W., Das, A. K., & Shahar, Y. (1996). EON: A Component-Based Approach to Automation of Protocol-Directed Therapy. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 3(6), 367-388. doi:10.1136/jamia.1996.97084511Ciccarese, P., Caffi, E., Quaglini, S., & Stefanelli, M. (2005). Architectures and tools for innovative Health Information Systems: The Guide Project. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 74(7-8), 553-562. doi:10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2005.02.001Shiffman, R. N., & Greenes, R. A. (1994). Improving Clinical Guidelines with Logic and Decision-table Techniques. Medical Decision Making, 14(3), 245-254. doi:10.1177/0272989x9401400306Peleg, M., Tu, S., Bury, J., Ciccarese, P., Fox, J., Greenes, R. A., … Stefanelli, M. (2003). Comparing Computer-interpretable Guideline Models: A Case-study Approach. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 10(1), 52-68. doi:10.1197/jamia.m1135Karadimas, H., Ebrahiminia, V., & Lepage, E. (2018). User-defined functions in the Arden Syntax: An extension proposal. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 92, 103-110. doi:10.1016/j.artmed.2015.11.003Peleg, M., Keren, S., & Denekamp, Y. (2008). Mapping computerized clinical guidelines to electronic medical records: Knowledge-data ontological mapper (KDOM). Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 41(1), 180-201. doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2007.05.003German, E., Leibowitz, A., & Shahar, Y. (2009). An architecture for linking medical decision-support applications to clinical databases and its evaluation. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 42(2), 203-218. doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2008.10.007Marcos, M., Maldonado, J. A., Martínez-Salvador, B., Boscá, D., & Robles, M. (2013). Interoperability of clinical decision-support systems and electronic health records using archetypes: A case study in clinical trial eligibility. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 46(4), 676-689. doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2013.05.004Marco-Ruiz, L., Moner, D., Maldonado, J. A., Kolstrup, N., & Bellika, J. G. (2015). Archetype-based data warehouse environment to enable the reuse of electronic health record data. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 84(9), 702-714. doi:10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2015.05.016Gooch, P., & Roudsari, A. (2011). Computerization of workflows, guidelines, and care pathways: a review of implementation challenges for process-oriented health information systems. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 18(6), 738-748. doi:10.1136/amiajnl-2010-000033Quaglini, S., Stefanelli, M., Cavallini, A., Micieli, G., Fassino, C., & Mossa, C. (2000). Guideline-based careflow systems. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 20(1), 5-22. doi:10.1016/s0933-3657(00)00050-6Schadow, G., Russler, D. C., & McDonald, C. J. (2001). Conceptual alignment of electronic health record data with guideline and workflow knowledge. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 64(2-3), 259-274. doi:10.1016/s1386-5056(01)00196-4González-Ferrer, A., ten Teije, A., Fdez-Olivares, J., & Milian, K. (2013). Automated generation of patient-tailored electronic care pathways by translating computer-interpretable guidelines into hierarchical task networks. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 57(2), 91-109. doi:10.1016/j.artmed.2012.08.008Shabo, A., Parimbelli, E., Quaglini, S., Napolitano, C., & Peleg, M. (2016). Interplay between Clinical Guidelines and Organizational Workflow Systems. Methods of Information in Medicine, 55(06), 488-494. doi:10.3414/me16-01-0006Mulyar, N., van der Aalst, W. M. P., & Peleg, M. (2007). A Pattern-based Analysis of Clinical Computer-interpretable Guideline Modeling Languages. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 14(6), 781-787. doi:10.1197/jamia.m2389Grando, M. A., Glasspool, D., & Fox, J. (2012). A formal approach to the analysis of clinical computer-interpretable guideline modeling languages. Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, 54(1), 1-13. doi:10.1016/j.artmed.2011.07.001Kaiser, K., & Marcos, M. (2015). Leveraging workflow control patterns in the domain of clinical practice guidelines. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, 16(1). doi:10.1186/s12911-016-0253-zMartínez-Salvador, B., & Marcos, M. (2016). Supporting the Refinement of Clinical Process Models to Computer-Interpretable Guideline Models. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 58(5), 355-366. doi:10.1007/s12599-016-0443-3Decision Model and Notation Version 1.0https://www.omg.org/spec/DMN/1.0Ghasemi, M., & Amyot, D. (2016). Process mining in healthcare: a systematised literature review. International Journal of Electronic Healthcare, 9(1), 60. doi:10.1504/ijeh.2016.078745Rebuge, Á., & Ferreira, D. R. (2012). Business process analysis in healthcare environments: A methodology based on process mining. Information Systems, 37(2), 99-116. doi:10.1016/j.is.2011.01.003Rovani, M., Maggi, F. M., de Leoni, M., & van der Aalst, W. M. P. (2015). Declarative process mining in healthcare. Expert Systems with Applications, 42(23), 9236-9251. doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2015.07.040Rojas, E., Munoz-Gama, J., Sepúlveda, M., & Capurro, D. (2016). Process mining in healthcare: A literature review. Journal of Biomedical Informatics, 61, 224-236. doi:10.1016/j.jbi.2016.04.007Lenkowicz, J., Gatta, R., Masciocchi, C., Casà, C., Cellini, F., Damiani, A., … Valentini, V. (2018). Assessing the conformity to clinical guidelines in oncology. Management Decision, 56(10), 2172-2186. doi:10.1108/md-09-2017-0906Fernández-Llatas, C., Benedi, J.-M., García-Gómez, J., & Traver, V. (2013). Process Mining for Individualized Behavior Modeling Using Wireless Tracking in Nursing Homes. Sensors, 13(11), 15434-15451. doi:10.3390/s131115434Qu, G., Liu, Z., Cui, S., & Tang, J. (2013). Study on Self-Adaptive Clinical Pathway Decision Support System Based on Case-Based Reasoning. Frontier and Future Development of Information Technology in Medicine and Education, 969-978. doi:10.1007/978-94-007-7618-0_95Van de Velde, S., Roshanov, P., Kortteisto, T., Kunnamo, I., Aertgeerts, B., Vandvik, P. O., & Flottorp, S. (2015). Tailoring implementation strategies for evidence-based recommendations using computerised clinical decision support systems: protocol for the development of the GUIDES tools. Implementation Science, 11(1). doi:10.1186/s13012-016-0393-

Supporting adaptiveness of cyber-physical processes through action-based formalisms

Cyber Physical Processes (CPPs) refer to a new generation of business processes enacted in many application environments (e.g., emergency management, smart manufacturing, etc.), in which the presence of Internet-of-Things devices and embedded ICT systems (e.g., smartphones, sensors, actuators) strongly influences the coordination of the real-world entities (e.g., humans, robots, etc.) inhabitating such environments. A Process Management System (PMS) employed for executing CPPs is required to automatically adapt its running processes to anomalous situations and exogenous events by minimising any human intervention. In this paper, we tackle this issue by introducing an approach and an adaptive Cognitive PMS, called SmartPM, which combines process execution monitoring, unanticipated exception detection and automated resolution strategies leveraging on three well-established action-based formalisms developed for reasoning about actions in Artificial Intelligence (AI), including the situation calculus, IndiGolog and automated planning. Interestingly, the use of SmartPM does not require any expertise of the internal working of the AI tools involved in the system

Investigation of Geomechanical Behavior of Laminated Rock Mass Through Experimental and Numerical Approach

Roof failure in the Appalachian underground coal fields occurs often in laminated shale. Laminated shale roof in coal mines fails in unique ways, such as cutter failure or delamination failure. Extensive studies have investigated the influential factors that cause laminated roof failure, which include in-situ stress, entry layout, roof span, and roof support. However, cutter failure continues to occur frequently and erratically. This is due to the lack of in-depth understanding of the inherent properties of the laminations, such as bedding plane strength, matrix strength, and bedding plane spacing, which in turn influence the geomechanical behavior of the laminated rock. These inherent properties vary and are therefore the significant factors influencing entry and support design. The objective of this dissertation is to discover the effect of lamination properties on the geomechanical behavior of laminated rocks through experimental and numerical analysis. The experimental approach included the development of synthetic laminated rock (SLR). The SLR included three different cohesive strengths (����). This research conducted biaxial tests and triaxial tests on the cubic laminated rock with a special platen. We analyzed the strength, failure mode, and deformation of laminated specimens with various ���� under varied stress conditions. The experimental results showed that ���� significantly influenced the SLR strength, modulus, and failure modes in biaxial stress conditions. Application of confining stress reduced the damage of SLR specimens and constrained the effect of ���� on SLR behavior. The results from the tests on SLR supported the development of a series of numerical models of underground coal mines with laminated roof. To simulate the laminated roof at different scales, this research used FLAC3D based on the finite difference method (FDM) and PFC3D based on the discrete element method (DEM). Next, this research developed the coal mine entry model with the laminated roof in the PFC program using laboratory data and investigated the effect of bedding plane spacing, bedding plane strength, and support pressure on roof stability. The results from the numerical analysis showed that the roof stability and stress magnitude inside the roof increased with both bedding plane spacing and bedding plane strength, and this effect was sensitive to these two properties. PFC then modeled the delamination process of laminated rock under various stress conditions. The results demonstrated that the delamination of an unconfined laminated rock initiates in the inner section of the bedding. Cutter failure initiated with damages that distributed extensively in the roof. We then developed a panel scale longwall model in PFC3D which was then coupled with FLAC3D for analyzing crack propagation in roof as well as understanding large scale failure behavior. Numerical results from the FLAC3D-PFC3D coupled model showed that the bedding plane strength significantly influenced the roof deformation and also modified the fracturing mechanism of the laminated roof. These effects are sensitive to the extraction activity of the entries and panels. These findings will advance knowledge on laminated roof failure and improve entry and support design