Weaving of Aspects in Business Process Management

Separation of cross-cutting concerns is an important issue in business process management, where Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modeling (AO-BPM) aims to support this separation through a new form of encapsulation technique. Although different researchers have investigated how these models can be designed to support separation of non-retroactive cross-cutting concerns, there is no study that defines the separation of retroactive ones. The lack of a unified definition of the syntax and the operational semantics for these models hinders their enactment in practice as well. As a result, the perceived usefulness and usability of these approaches have not yet been investigated so far. Thus, this article fills this gap by formalizing an AO-BPM language and the semantics that can support enactment of such models. The semantics is validated through the state-space analysis technique, and the feasibility of the implementation is also demonstrated. The perceived usefulness and easy to use of the AO-BPM is evaluated by applying the Technology Acceptance Model during a workshop session. The result shows that participants perceived the approach usable and easy to use

Combination usage of process mining and adaptive case management

Process mining performs well on structured processes like BPM. In recent years, Adaptive Case Management (ACM) was introduced to support knowledge workers by giving them the permission to define processes on the fly in unpredictable situations. By doing so, processes seem to be unstructured and hard to be enhanced. The goal of this thesis is to analyze how process mining can improve and benefit unstructured processes and to develop a prototype for a potential application. The scenario analysis focuses on (1) supporting knowledge workers with process mining, (2) transiting from unstructured to structured processes through process mining, and (3) compliance regulations in unstructured processes through process mining. One scenario is selected based on the analysis for implementing a prototype. Due to the importance of compliance regulations and rare researches on compliance regulations in unstructured processes, the scenario (3) is selected and an approach of compliance checking for unstructured processes using process mining is proposed. The prototype of the approach leverages process mining to discover hidden structured in unstructured processes and implements compliance checking functionalities consisting of graphical rule definition, rule creation and rule checking on a log in Oryx platform. The prototype visualizes violating paths on the process model and reports all violating process instances. The evaluation proves that the prototype is indeed capable of compliance checking with a large real-life data log