Towards a methodology for the engineering of event-driven process applications

Successful applications of the Internet of Things such as smart cities, smart logistics, and predictive maintenance, build on observing and analyzing business-related objects in the real world for business process execution and monitoring. In this context, complex event processing is increasingly used to integrate events from sensors with events stemming from business process management systems. This paper describes a methodology to combine the areas and engineer an event-driven logistics processes application. Thereby, we describe the requirements, use cases and lessons learned to design and implement such an architecture

Invariantenverifikation in DAWN: Ein Beispiel

In dieser Arbeit wird anhand einer Lösung zum Problem der Phasensynchronisation die Integration der S-Invarianten-Analysetechnik in die Methodik von DAWN exemplarisch vorgeführt.In DAWN lassen sich verteilte Algorithmen als höhere Petrinetze modellieren, Eigenschaften verteilter Algorithmen spezifizieren und Korrektheitsbeweise führen

The relationship between workflow graphs and free-choice workflow nets

Workflow graphs represent the main control-flow constructs of industrial process modeling languages such as BPMN, EPC and UML Activity diagrams, whereas free-choice workflow nets is a well understood class of Petri nets that possesses many efficient analysis techniques. In this paper, we provide new results on the translation between workflow graphs and free-choice workflow nets. We distinguish workflow graphs with and without inclusive Or-logic. For workflow graphs without inclusive logic, we show that workflow graphs and free-choice workflow nets are essentially the same thing. More precisely, each workflow graph and each free-choice workflow net can be brought into an equivalent normal form such that the normal forms are, in some sense, isomorphic. This result gives rise to a translation from arbitrary free-choice workflow nets to workflow graphs. For workflow graphs with inclusive logic, we provide various techniques to replace inclusive Or-joins by subgraphs without inclusive logic, thus giving rise to translations from workflow graphs to free-choice nets. Additionally, we characterize the applicability of these replacements. Finally, we also display a simple workflow graph with an inclusive Or-join, which, in some sense, cannot be replaced. This shows a limitation of translating inclusive logic into free-choice nets and illustrates also a difficulty of translating inclusive logic into general Petri nets. Keywords: Workflow graphs; Petri nets; Free choice; Inclusive OR-joi

Identifying refactoring opportunities in process model repositories

Context: In order to ensure high quality of a process model repository, refactoring operations can be applied to correct anti-patterns, such as overlap of process models, inconsistent labeling of activities and overly complex models. However, if a process model collection is created and maintained by different people over a longer period of time, manual detection of such refactoring opportunities becomes difficult, simply due to the number of processes in the repository. Consequently, there is a need for techniques to detect refactoring opportunities automatically. Objective: This paper proposes a technique for automatically detecting refactoring opportunities. Method: We developed the technique based on metrics that can be used to measure the consistency of activity labels as well as the extent to which processes overlap and the type of overlap that they have. We evaluated it, by applying it to two large process model repositories. Results: The evaluation shows that the technique can be used to pinpoint the approximate location of three types of refactoring opportunities with high precision and recall and of one type of refactoring opportunity with high recall, but low precision. Conclusion: We conclude that the technique presented in this paper can be used in practice to automatically detect a number of anti-patterns that can be corrected by refactoring

Where did I go wrong? : explaining errors in business process models

Business process modeling is still a challenging task — especially since more and more aspects are added to the models, such as data lifecycles, security constraints, or compliance rules. At the same time, formal methods allow for a detection of errors in the early modeling phase. Detected errors are usually explained with a path from the initial to the error state. These paths can grow unmanageably and make the understanding and fixing of errors very time consuming. This paper addresses this issue and proposes a novel explanation of errors: Instead of listing the actions on the path to the error, only the decisions that lead to it are reported and highlighted in the original model. Furthermore, we exploit concurrency to create a compact artifact to explain errors

Dynamic skipping and blocking and dead path elimination for cyclic workflows

We propose and study dynamic versions of the classical flexibility constructs skip and block and motivate and define a formal semantics for them. We show that our semantics for dynamic blocking is a generalization of classical dead-path-elimination and solves the long-standing open problem to define dead-path-elimination for cyclic workflows. This gives rise to a simple and fully local semantics for inclusive gateways

A software architecture for a transportation control tower

A Transportation Control Tower is a software application that facilitates transportation planners with easily monitoring and dispatching transportation resources. This paper presents a software architecture for such an application. It focuses in particular on the novel aspects of the software architecture. These are: the ability to easily congure the monitoring of resources and tasks; the ability to automatically create the statements for monitoring resources and tasks based on the transportation plan; and the ability to dynamically adjust the monitoring statements, based on adjustments to the transportation plan. A prototype of the software architecture is implemented and evaluated on three usage scenarios

Instantaneous soundness checking of industrial business process models

We report on a case study on control-flow analysis of business process models. We checked 735 industrial business process models from financial services, telecommunications and other domains. We investigated these models for soundness (absence of deadlock and lack of synchronization) using three different approaches: the business process verification tool Woflan, the Petri net model checker LoLA, and a recently developed technique based on SESE decomposition. We evaluate the various techniques used by these approaches in terms of their ability of accelerating the check. Our results show that industrial business process models can be checked in a few milliseconds, which enables tight integration of modeling with control-flow analysis. We also briefly compare the diagnostic information delivered by the different approaches

A general framework for correlating business process characteristics

Process discovery techniques make it possible to automatically derive process models from event data. However, often one is not only interested in discovering the control-flow but also in answering questions like "What do the cases that are late have in common?", "What characterizes the workers that skip this check activity?", and "Do people work faster if they have more work?", etc. Such questions can be answered by combining process mining with classification (e.g., decision tree analysis). Several authors have proposed ad-hoc solutions for specific questions, e.g., there is work on predicting the remaining processing time and recommending activities to minimize particular risks. However, as shown in this paper, it is possible to unify these ideas and provide a general framework for deriving and correlating process characteristics. First, we show how the desired process characteristics can be derived and linked to events. Then, we show that we can derive the selected dependent characteristic from a set of independent characteristics for a selected set of events. This can be done for any process characteristic one can think of. The approach is highly generic and implemented as plug-in for the ProM framework. Its applicability is demonstrated by using it to answer to a wide range of questions put forward by the UWV (the Dutch Employee Insurance Agency)