Inventing Less, Reusing More and Adding Intelligence to Business Process Modeling

Recently, a variety of workflow patterns has been proposed focusing on specific aspects like control flow, data flow, and resource assignments. Though these patterns are relevant for implementing Business Process Modeling (BPM) tools and for evaluating the expressiveness of BPM languages, they do not contribute to reduce redundant specifications of recurrent business functions when modeling business processes. Furthermore, contemporary BPM tools do not support process designers in defining, querying, and reusing activity patterns as building blocks for process modeling. Related to these problems this paper proposes a set of activity patterns, evidences their practical relevance, and introduces a BPM tool for the modeling of business processes based on the reuse of these activity patterns. Altogether our approach fosters reuse of business functions specifications and helps to improve the quality and comparability of business process models

Activity Patterns in Process-aware Information Systems: Basic Concepts and Empirical Evidence

Recently, a variety of workflow patterns was suggested for capturing different aspects in process-aware information systems (PAISs) including control and data flow, resources, process change, and exception handling. All these patterns are highly relevant for implementing PAISs and for designing process modeling languages. However, current patterns provide only a partial answer to the question which business functions a designer might want to reuse when modeling processes. This paper presents a revised version of a collection of activity patterns to deal with this challenge. Each of them is related to a recurrent business function as it can be frequently found in process models (e.g., task execution request, notification, approval). We describe the identified activity patterns and their variants in detail. The main purpose of our paper is to discuss results from empirical studies, in which we analyzed more than 200 process models in order to evidence the practical relevance of the patterns. This includes a detailed analysis of the context in which activity patterns occur as well the frequency of this occurrence. These empirical findings can be used for the design of more intelligent, pattern-based process modeling tools

A Ontology-based Approach for Business Process Compliance Checking

International audienceThe early detection of flaws and errors has become a significant feature of a business process modeling tool. This paper proposes an ontology-based approach for business process compliance checking. The business processes and the business rules are represented in a machine understandable form, a reasoner is used to reason on this knowledge base for detecting the potential semantic error by using a set of predefined rules

Realizing Adaptive Process-aware Information Systems with ADEPT2

In dynamic environments it must be possible to quickly implement new business processes, to enable ad-hoc deviations from the defined business processes on-demand (e.g., by dynamically adding, deleting or moving process activities), and to support dynamic process evolution (i.e., to propagate process schema changes to already running process instances). These fundamental requirements must be met without affecting process consistency and robustness of the process-aware information system. In this paper we describe how these challenges have been addressed in the ADEPT2 process management system. Our overall vision is to provide a next generation technology for the support of dynamic processes, which enables full process lifecycle management and which can be applied to a variety of application domains

(Neg)Entropic scenarios affecting the wicked design spaces of knowledge management systems

CITATION: Schmitt, U. 2020. (Neg)Entropic scenarios affecting the wicked design spaces of knowledge management systems. Entropy, 22(2):169, doi:10.3390/e22020169.The original publication is available at https://www.mdpi.comThe envisioned embracing of thriving knowledge societies is increasingly compromised by threatening perceptions of information overload, attention poverty, opportunity divides, and career fears. This paper traces the roots of these symptoms back to causes of information entropy and structural holes, invisible private and undiscoverable public knowledge which characterize the sad state of our current knowledge management and creation practices. As part of an ongoing design science research and prototyping project, the article’s (neg)entropic perspectives complement a succession of prior multi-disciplinary publications. Looking forward, it proposes a novel decentralized generative knowledge management approach that prioritizes the capacity development of autonomous individual knowledge workers not at the expense of traditional organizational knowledge management systems but as a viable means to foster their fruitful co-evolution. The article, thus, informs relevant stakeholders about the current unsustainable status quo inhibiting knowledge workers; it presents viable remedial options (as a prerequisite for creating the respective future generative Knowledge Management (KM) reality) to afford a sustainable solution with the generative potential to evolve into a prospective general-purpose technology.https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/22/2/169Publisher's versio

Time Patterns for Process-aware Information Systems: A Pattern-based Analysis

Formal specification and operational support of time constraints constitute fundamental challenges for any enterprise information system. Although temporal constraints play an important role in the context of long-running business processes, time support is very limited in existing process management systems. By contrast, different kinds of planning tools (e.g., calendar systems and project management tools) provide more sophisticated facilities for handling task-related time constraints, but lack an operational support for business processes. This paper presents a set of 10 time patterns to foster the systematic comparison of these different technologies in respect to time management. The proposed patterns are all based on empirical evidence from several large case studies. In addition, we provide an in-depth evaluation of selected process management systems, calendar systems and project management tools based on the suggested patterns. The presented work will not only facilitate comparison of these different technologies in respect to their support of time constraints, but also make evident that their integration offers promising perspectives in respect to time support for long-running business processes

Design Considerations for Incorporating Flexible Workflow and Multi-AgentInteractions in Agent Societies

In this paper, we present our conception of a Flexible Agent Society (FAS), an extension of the Contractual Agent Society (CAS) idea. Essentially, a FAS is a distributed information system modeling an agent society, providing agents with the ability to collaborate in order to meet certain common goals. In a FAS, unlike the CAS, the agents themselves have control over the workflow processesand multi-agent conversations that they need to execute in order to meet their common goals