A Heuristic Approach for Discovering Reference Models by Mining Process Model Variants

Recently, a new generation of adaptive Process-Aware Information Systems (PAISs) has emerged, which enables structural process changes during runtime while preserving PAIS robustness and consistency. Such flexibility, in turn, leads to a large number of process variants derived from the same model, but differing in structure. Generally, such variants are expensive to configure and maintain. This paper provides a heuristic search algorithm which fosters learning from past process changes by mining process variants. The algorithm discovers a reference model based on which the need for future process configuration and adaptation can be reduced. It additionally provides the flexibility to control the process evolution procedure, i.e., we can control to what degree the discovered reference model differs from the original one. As benefit, we can not only control the effort for updating the reference model, but also gain the flexibility to perform only the most important adaptations of the current reference model. Our mining algorithm is implemented and evaluated by a simulation using more than 7000 process models. Simulation results indicate strong performance and scalability of our algorithm even when facing large-sized process models

What BPM Technology Can Do for Healthcare Process Support

Healthcare organizations are facing the challenge of delivering personalized services to their patients in a cost-effective and efficient manner. This, in turn, requires advanced IT support for healthcare processes covering both organizational procedures and knowledge-intensive, dynamic treatment processes. Nowadays, required agility is often hindered by a lack of flexibility in hospital information systems. To overcome this inflexibility a new generation of information systems, denoted as process-aware information systems (PAISs), has emerged. In contrast to data- and function-centered information systems, a PAIS separates process logic from application code and thus provides an additional architectural layer. However, the introduction of process-aware hospital information systems must neither result in rigidity nor restrict staff members in their daily work. This keynote presentation reflects on recent developments from the business process management (BPM) domain, which enable process adaptation, process flexibility, and process evolution. These key features will be illustrated along existing BPM frameworks. Altogether, emerging BPM methods, concepts and technologies will contribute to further enhance IT support for healthcare processes

Materiality Maps – Process Mining Data Visualization for Financial Audits

Financial audits are a safeguard to prevent the distribution of false information which could detrimentally influence stakeholder decisions. The increasing integration of computer technology for the processing of business transactions create new challenges for auditors who have to deal with increasingly large and complex data. Process mining can be used as a novel Big Data analysis technique to support auditors in this context. A challenge for using this type of technique is the representation of analyzed data. Process mining algorithms usually discover large sets of mined process variants. This study introduces a new approach to visualize process mining results specifically for financial audits in an aggregate manner as materiality maps. Such maps provide an overview about the processes identified in an organization and indicate which business processes should be considered for audit purposes. They reduce an auditor’s information overload and help to improve decision making in the audit process

A Reflection on the Interrelations Between Business Process Management and Requirements Engineering with an Agility Perspective

The paper points out some aspects of the interrelations between business process management, agility, flexibility, and requirements engineering. It shows some possibilities for agile development of business processes and for the development of flexible processes for changing requirements

Representing Block-structured Process Models as Order Matrices: Basic Concepts, Formal Properties, Algorithms

In various cases we need to transform a process model into a matrix representation for further analysis. In this paper, we introduce the notion of Order Matrix, which enables unique representation of block-structured process models. We present algorithms for transforming a block-structured process model into a corresponding order matrix and vice verse. We then prove that such order matrix constitutes a unique representation of a block-structured process model; i.e., if we transform a process model into an order matrix, and then transform this matrix back into a process model, the two process models are trace equivalent; i.e., they show same behavior. Finally, we analyze algebraic properties of order matrices

Healthcare Process Support: Achievements, Challenges, Current Research

Healthcare organizations are facing the challenge of delivering high-quality services to their patients at affordable costs. To tackle this challenge, the Medical Informatics community targets at formalisms for developing decision-support systems (DSSs) based on clinical guidelines. At the same time, business process management (BPM) enables IT support for healthcare processes, e.g., based on workflow technology. By integrating aspects from these two fields, promising perspectives for achieving better healthcare process support arise. The perspectives and limitations of IT support for healthcare processes provided the focus of three Workshops on Process-oriented Information Systems (ProHealth). These were held in conjunction with the International Conference on Business Process Management in 2007-2009. The ProHealth workshops provided a forum wherein challenges, paradigms, and tools for optimized process support in healthcare were debated. Following the success of these workshops, this special issue on process support in healthcare provides extended papers by research groups who contributed multiple times to the ProHealth workshop series. These works address issues pertaining to healthcare process modeling, process-aware healthcare information system, workflow management in healthcare, IT support for guideline implementation and medical decision support, flexibility in healthcare processes, process interoperability in healthcare and healthcare standards, clinical semantics of healthcare processes, healthcare process patterns, best practices for designing healthcare processes, and healthcare process validation, verification, and evaluation

Enabling Flexibility in Process-Aware Information Systems: Challenges, Methods, Technologies

In today’s dynamic business world, the success of a company increasingly depends on its ability to react to changes in its environment in a quick and flexible way. Companies have therefore identified process agility as a competitive advantage to address business trends like increasing product and service variability or faster time to market, and to ensure business IT alignment. Along this trend, a new generation of information systems has emerged—so-called process-aware information systems (PAIS), like workflow management systems, case handling tools, and service orchestration engines. With this book, Reichert and Weber address these flexibility needs and provide an overview of PAIS with a strong focus on methods and technologies fostering flexibility for all phases of the process lifecycle (i.e., modeling, configuration, execution and evolution). Their presentation is divided into six parts. Part I starts with an introduction of fundamental PAIS concepts and establishes the context of process flexibility in the light of practical scenarios. Part II focuses on flexibility support for pre-specified processes, the currently predominant paradigm in the field of business process management (BPM). Part III details flexibility support for loosely specified processes, which only partially specify the process model at build-time, while decisions regarding the exact specification of certain model parts are deferred to the run-time. Part IV deals with user- and data-driven processes, which aim at a tight integration of processes and data, and hence enable an increased flexibility compared to traditional PAIS. Part V introduces existing technologies and systems for the realization of a flexible PAIS. Finally, Part VI summarizes the main ideas of this book and gives an outlook on advanced flexibility issues. The attached pdf file gives a preview on Chapter 3 of the book which explains the book's overall structure