Executing Lifecycle Processes in Object-Aware Process Management

Data-centric approaches to business process management, in general, no longer require specific activities to be executed in a certain order, but instead data values must be present in business objects for a successful process completion. While this holds the promise of more flexible processes, the addition of the data perspective results in increased complexity. Therefore, data-centric approaches must be able to cope with the increased complexity, while still fulfilling the promise of high process flexibility. Object-aware process management specifies business processes in terms of objects as well as their lifecycle processes. Lifecycle processes determine how an object acquires all necessary data values. As data values are not always available in the order the lifecycle process of an object requires, the lifecycle process must be able to flexibly handle these deviations. Object-aware process management provides operational semantics with built-in flexible data acquisition, instead of tasking the process modeler with pre-specifying all execution variants. At the technical level, the flexible data acquisition is accomplished with process rules, which efficiently realize the operational semantics

Towards Real-Time Progress Determination of Object-Aware Business Processes

To stay competitive, companies need to continuously improve and evolve their business processes. In this endeavour, business process optimisations and improvements are key elements. In particular, the monitoring of business processes enables the early discovery of problems and errors already during process enactment. Two approaches can be pursued to achieve this: real-time, also called online monitoring, and offline monitoring. A subtask of real-time monitoring is to determine the current progress of a business process, which is particularly challenging if the latter is composed of loosely coupled, smaller processes that interact with each other, like object lifecycle processes in data-centric approaches to BPM, which result in large process structures. This position paper discusses the challenges of determining the progress of such object-aware processes in real-time and defines research questions that need to be investigated in further work

Towards the Discovery of Object-Aware Processes

There has been a huge body of research in order to reduce manual efforts in creating executable process models through the automated discovery of process models from the event logs created by information systems. Regarding activity-centric processes, such event logs comprise case ids and events related to the execution of process activities. However, there exist alternative process management paradigms, such as object-aware processes, for which existing algorithms fail to discover a sound model. These algorithms do not treat data as first-class citizens, but solely rely on the information from event logs. In consequence, existing discovery algorithms are insufficient for discovering object-aware processes. To address this issue, discovery algorithms need to consider additional data sources (e.g., existing forms). This paper discusses the need for dedicated discovery techniques in object-aware processes

A Dashboard-based Approach for Monitoring Object-Aware Processes

Data (e.g., event logs) gathered during the execution of business processes enable valuable insights into actual process performance. To leverage this knowledge, these data should be analyzed and interpreted in the context of the respective processes. Corresponding analyses allow for a comprehensive process monitoring as well as the discovery of weaknesses and potential process improvements. This also applies to object-aware processes, where data drives process execution and, thus, is treated as first-class citizen. This paper introduces a dashboard with advanced monitoring functions for object-aware processes

Real-time monitoring of progress in object-aware business processes

A high degree of competition require companies to constantly improve and further develop their business processes (BP). Therefore, optimisations and improvements are an important key element in this endeavour. The monitoring of a BP should detect complications and errors quickly to support this objective. Two approaches can be pursued to achieve this: real-time, also called online, monitoring and offline monitoring. A sub task of real-time monitoring is determining the current progress of a business process. Business processes in PHILharmonicFlows consist of objects with lifecycles, describing the behaviour of an object, and coordination processes, which organise and structure the overall business process. The composition of an object-aware business processes is extremely complex. Many instances of objects and lifecycles exist. Running concurrently to each other. Further, there are coordination constraints between objects that restrict certain executions of the overall business process. Due of the complexity, there is no intuitive solution for real-time monitoring of progress in an object-aware business process. Progress of the overall business process consists of a combination of the individual progress measures to these contributing parts. Therefore, a method called PHILharmonicFlows Progress Determination (PPD-Method) is developed that can be used to determine the progress of object-aware processes. The progress representation provides users with knowledge of the current status. In addition, standstills can be detected quickly and subsequently remedied. As a first step, the PPD-Method uses a fixed snapshot of a business process, taken during execution, to determine progress. This is called a static progress determination and reduces the complexity of the calculation. Based on the static determination, the dynamic aspect of progress execution can be incorporated into the progress determination, such as instantiation of an object or state changes. This lead to dynamic determination of progress. The definition of progress for object-aware processes i.e., what constitutes progress, offers several options. Each option is thoroughly assessed and evaluated. According on the metaphor of a progress bar and the structure of the business process, design choices for progress determination for the PPD-Method are identified based on the best option. Finally, this thesis develops algorithms as part of the PPD-Method for the static determination of object lifecycle progress