Feedback on differences between business processes

This paper presents techniques to pinpoint differences between business processes. We say that two processes are different if they are not (completed trace) equivalent. We developed techniques to point out where two processes are different and to explain why they are different. This in contrast to techniques that provide simple true/false answers about whether two processes are equivalent or not. We developed the techniques by first formalizing frequently occurring differences that we discovered in practice and subsequently developing the algorithms that detect these differences. The techniques can be used for various purposes, such as detecting differences between processes in a merger between organizations

Message from the EDOC 2017 workshop chairs

Presents the introductory welcome message from the conference proceedings. May include the conference officers' congratulations to all involved with the conference event and publication of the proceedings record

Predicting throughput time

Availability of machines is very important in achieving operational excellence. In Aerospace, this need is especially high, to make sure that airplanes can keep up with flight plans and passengers, as well as cargo, can get to their destination in time. However, machines have to be maintained from time to time. Then, it helps to have a good estimate of when the maintenance activity will be ready. This enables the maintenance department to take appropriate measures, such as keeping the optimal number of spare parts in stock and optimally planning for down time of the machine. This operations practice describes how Fokker Services implemented a technique for predicting the throughput time of their maintenance activities on airplane engines. It shows that they managed to improve their throughput time prediction, which potentially means a higher customer satisfaction can be achieved. Moreover, the techniques that they use to predict the throughput time of a repair, can also be used to predict the expected time until the next repair or maintenance action is necessary. We expect that – with the advent of Internet of Things – such ‘data-driven condition based maintenance’, will not just be important for Fokker Services, but for all companies that maintain expensive machinery

Linguistic summarization of event logs - a practical approach

The amount of data that is generated during the execution of a business process is growing. As a consequence it is increasingly hard to extract useful information from the large amount of data that is produced. Linguistic summarization helps to point business analysts in the direction of useful information, by verbalizing interesting patterns that exist in the data. In previous work we showed how linguistic summarization can be used to automatically generate diagnostic statements about event logs, such as ‘for most cases that contained the sequence ABC, the throughput time was long’. However, we also showed that our technique produced too many of these statements to be useful in a practical setting. Therefore this paper presents a novel technique for linguistic summarization of event logs, which generates linguistic summaries that are concise enough to be used in a practical setting, while at the same time enriching the summaries that are produced by also enabling conjunctive statements. The improved technique is based on pruning and clustering of linguistic summaries. We show that it can be used to reduce the number of summary statements 80–100% compared to previous work. In a survey among 51 practitioners, we found that practitioners consider linguistic summarization useful and easy to use and intend to use it if it were commercially available

Semantics and analysis of business process models in BPMN

The Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is a standard for capturing business processes in the early phases of systems development. The mix of constructs found in BPMN makes it possible to create models with semantic errors. Such errors are especially serious, because errors in the early phases of systems development are among the most costly and hardest to correct. The ability to statically check the semantic correctness of models is thus a desirable feature for modelling tools based on BPMN. Accordingly, this paper proposes a mapping from BPMN to a formal language, namely Petri nets, for which efficient analysis techniques are available. The proposed mapping has been implemented as a tool that, in conjunction with existing Petri net-based tools, enables the static analysis of BPMN models. The formalisation also led to the identification of deficiencies in the BPMN standard specificatio

An evaluation of BPMN modeling tools

Various BPMN modeling tools are available and it is close to impossible to understand their functional differences without simply trying them out. This paper presents an evaluation framework and presents the outcomes of its application to a set of five BPMN modeling tools. We report on various differences, for example with respect to the level of BPMN support and the smart support a modeler may experience using these tools. Interestingly, while tools that are provided by commercial parties do offer more integration options with other tools in BPM suites, they cannot be said to outperform academic tools in other respects

Business process architecture : use and correctness

Becoming more and more process oriented, companies develop collections of hundreds or even thousands of business process models that represent the complex system of cooperating entities that form an organization. Designing and analyzing the structure of this system of business process models emerges as a new challenge, which is covered by the field of business process architecture. This paper presents a formal conceptual framework for representing and analyzing business process architectures. It identifies patterns of relations between process models, and it introduces anti-patterns that represent erroneous relations between them. The conceptual framework and the patterns are evaluated using a real-world process model collection. The evaluation shows that explicitly representing and analyzing relations between process models can help improving the correctness and consistency of the business process architecture as a whole

Fast business process similarity search with feature-based similarity estimation

Nowadays, business process management plays an important role in the management of organizations. More and more organizations describe their operations as business processes, and the intra- and interorganizational interactions between operations as services. It is common for organizations to have collections of hundreds or even thousands of business processes. Consequently, techniques are required to quickly find relevant business process models in such a collection. Currently, techniques exist that can rank all business process models in a collection based on their similarity to a query business process model. However, those techniques compare the query model with each model in the collection in terms of graph structure, which is inefficient and computationally complex. Therefore, this paper presents a technique to make this more efficient. The technique selects small characteristic model fragments, called features, which are used to efficiently estimate model similarities and classify them as relevant, irrelevant or potentially relevant to a query model. Only potentially relevant models must be compared using the existing techniques. Experiments show that this helps to retrieve similar models at least 3.5 times faster without impacting the quality of the results; and 5.5 times faster if a quality reduction of 1% is acceptable

Business process model repositories – framework and survey

Context: Large organizations often run hundreds or even thousands of different business processes. Managing such large collections of business process models is a challenging task. Software can assist in performing that task, by supporting common management functions such as storage, search and version management of models. It can also provide advanced functions that are specific for managing collections of process models, such as managing the consistency of public and private processes. Software that supports the management of large collections of business process models is called: business process model repository software. Objective: This paper contributes to the development of business process model repositories, by analyzing the state of the art. Method: To perform the analysis a literature survey and a comparison of existing (business process model) repository technology is performed. Result: The results of the state of the art analysis are twofold. First, a framework for business process model repositories is presented, which consists of a management model and a reference architecture. The management model lists the functionality that can be provided and the reference architecture presents the components that provide that functionality. Second, an analysis is presented of the extent to which existing business process model repositories implement the functionality from the framework. Conclusion: The results presented in the paper are valuable as a comprehensive overview of business process model repository functionality. In addition they form a basis for a future research agenda. We conclude that existing repositories focus on traditional functionality rather than exploiting the full potential of information management tools, thus we show that there is a strong basis for further research