Discovery and Analysis of Activity Pattern Cooccurrences in Business Process Models

Research on workflow activity patterns recently emerged in order to increase the reuse of recurring business functions (e.g., notification, approval, and decision). One important aspect is to identify pattern cooccurrences and to utilize respective information for creating modeling recommendations regarding the most suited activity patterns to be combined with an already used one. Activity patterns as well as their cooccurrences can be identified through the analysis of process models rather than event logs. Related to this problem, this paper proposes a method for discovering and analyzing activity pattern co-occurrences in business process models. Our results are used for developing a BPM tool which fosters the modeling of business processes based on the reuse of activity patterns. Our tool includes an inference engine whichconsiders the patterns co-occurrences to give design time recommendations for pattern usage

On the Support of Workflow Activity Patterns in Process Modeling Tools: Purpose and Requirements

Patterns increase the reuse of existing knowledge (e.g., design solutions, source code) within organizations and help to achieve consistency between applications. Patterns for process design have received considerable attention by both business analysts and researchers. Several pattern categories have been proposed including patterns for control and data flow, resources, process change, and exception handling. Workflow activity patterns, which can be used as building blocks for business process models (e.g., approval, task execution request), however, have not been explored in-depth so far. Related to this problem we have proposed a set of workflow activity patterns in the ProWAP project. Each activity pattern represents a recurrent business function as it can be frequently found in business processes. The completeness and existence of our activity patterns has been evaluated through an extensive analysis of real process models. In this paper we discuss how to implement activity patterns within a BPM tool. In particular, we describe major goals and requirements of the BPM tool we are currently developing and in which we apply workflow activity patterns. In this context, we also provide a discussion regarding the notion we use for representing activity patterns (BPMN 1.2 vs. UML 2.0)