Artifact Lifecycle Discovery

Artifact-centric modeling is a promising approach for modeling business processes based on the so-called business artifacts - key entities driving the company's operations and whose lifecycles define the overall business process. While artifact-centric modeling shows significant advantages, the overwhelming majority of existing process mining methods cannot be applied (directly) as they are tailored to discover monolithic process models. This paper addresses the problem by proposing a chain of methods that can be applied to discover artifact lifecycle models in Guard-Stage-Milestone notation. We decompose the problem in such a way that a wide range of existing (non-artifact-centric) process discovery and analysis methods can be reused in a flexible manner. The methods presented in this paper are implemented as software plug-ins for ProM, a generic open-source framework and architecture for implementing process mining tools

Data in Business Process Models. A Preliminary Empirical Study

Traditional activity-centric process modeling languages treat data as simple black boxes acting as input or output for activities. Many alternate and emerging process modeling paradigms, such as case handling and artifact-centric process modeling, give data a more central role. This is achieved by introducing lifecycles and states for data objects, which is beneficial when modeling data-or knowledge-intensive processes. We assume that traditional activity-centric process modeling languages lack the capabilities to adequately capture the complexity of such processes. To verify this assumption we conducted an online interview among BPM experts. The results not only allow us to identify various profiles of persons modeling business processes, but also the problems that exist in contemporary modeling languages w.r.t. The modeling of business data. Overall, this preliminary empirical study confirms the necessity of data-awareness in process modeling notations in general

Specifying artifact-centric business process models in UML: technical report

In recent years, the artifact-centric approach to process modeling has attracted a lot of attention. One of the research lines in this area is finding a suitable way to represent the dimensions in this approach. Bearing this in mind, this paper proposes a way to specify artifact-centric business process models by means of well-known UML diagrams, from a high-level of abstraction and with a technology-independent perspective. UML is a graphical language, widely used and with a precise semantics.Preprin

Specifying and Executing User Agents in an Environment of Reasoning and RESTful Systems Using the Guard-Stage-Milestone Approach

For Read-Write Linked Data, an environment of reasoning and RESTful interaction, we investigate the use of the Guard-Stage-Milestone approach for specifying and executing user agents. We present an ontology to specify user agents. Moreover, we give operational semantics to the ontology in a rule language that allows for executing user agents on Read-Write Linked Data. We evaluate our approach formally and regarding performance. Our work shows that despite different assumptions of this environment in contrast to the traditional environment of workflow management systems, the Guard-Stage-Milestone approach can be transferred and successfully applied on the web of Read-Write Linked Data

Modeling Process Interactions with Coordination Processes

With the rise of data-centric process management paradigms, small and interdependent processes, such as artifacts or object lifecycles, form a business process by interacting with each other. To arrive at a meaningful overall business process, these process interactions must be coordinated. One challenge is the proper consideration of one-to-many and many-to-many relations between interacting processes. Other challenges arise from the flexible, concurrent execution of the processes. Relational process structures and semantic relationships have been proposed for tackling these individual challenges. This paper introduces coordination processes, which bring together both relational process structures and semantic relationships, leveraging their features to enable proper coordination support for interdependent, concurrently running processes. Coordination processes contribute an abstracted and concise model for coordinating the highly complex interactions of interrelated processes

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

On Handling Business Process Anomalies through Artifact-based Modeling

Control flow-based process modeling notations, like BPMN, are good at dening the normal execution flow and the management of foreseen exceptions. When unforeseen situations occur, one cannot detect if the execution is still acceptable with respect to the process definition. In contrast, artifact-centric process modeling notations, like the Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM), are better suited for this kind of scenarios: they define a process in terms of acceptable states and do not enforce any specific execution flow. This improves flexibility, but hampers the clarity of the defined models. The goal of this paper is to show how an extension of GSM, i.e., E-GSM, can be used to detect deviations from the execution path as modeled in BPMN, while keeping the process execution alive

Extending CMMN with entity life cycles

In the domain of business process modeling, a case denotes a situation that requires a customized treatment, and this may take place if the case workers are entitled to decide the tasks to perform as well as their ordering. In the recent CMMN (Case Management Model and Notation) standard, a case involves both an information structure and a process. The former is patterned on the file system structure and the latter is made up of stages, which are groupings of interrelated tasks. The standard leaves some open issues, such as the determination of the performers of the tasks, and the definition of the inputs and outputs of the tasks in terms of the information items affected. To address these issues, this paper proposes an extension to CMMN in which stages represent states of information items whose types along with their attributes and relationships are defined in an information model. The benefits of the extension are illustrated by means of an example that concerns the handling of papers submitted to conferences

Artifact-driven Process Monitoring: Dynamically Binding Real-world Objects to Running Processes

Monitoring inter-organizational business processes requires explicit knowledge about when activities start and complete. This is a challenge because no single system controls the process, activities might not be directly recorded, and the overall course of execution might only be determined at runtime. In this paper, we address these problems by integrating process monitoring with sensor data from real-world objects. We formalize our approach using the E-GSM artifact-centric language. Since the association between real-world objects and process instances is often only determined at runtime, our approach also caters for dynamic binding and unbinding at runtime