Web-Based Modelling and Collaborative Simulation of Declarative Processes.

Abstract. As a provider of Electronic Case Management solutions to knowledge-intensive businesses and organizations, the Danish company Exformatics has in recent years identified a need for flexible process support in the tools that we pro-vide to our customers. We have addressed this need by adapting DCR Graphs, a formal declarative workflow notation developed at the IT University of Copen-hagen. Through close collaboration with academia we first integrated execution support for the notation into our existing tools, by leveraging a cloud-based pro-cess engine implementing the DCR formalism. Over the last two years we have taken this adoption of DCR Graphs to the next level and decided to treat the nota-tion as a product of its own by developing a stand-alone web-based collaborative portal for the modelling and simulation of declarative workflows. The purpose of the portal is to facilitate end-user discussions on how knowledge workers really work, by enabling collaborative simulation of processes. In earlier work we re-ported on the integration of DCR Graphs as a workflow execution formalism in the existing Exformatics ECM products. In this paper we report on the advances we have made over the last two years, we describe the new declarative process modelling portal, discuss its features, describe the process of its development, re-port on the findings of an initial evaluation of the usability of the tool, resulting from a tutorial on declarative modelling with DCR Graphs that we organized at last years BPM conference and present our plans for the future

Hybrid process technologies in the financial sector

Abstract. Danish mortgage credit institutes deal with highly variable and knowledge-intensive processes. At the same time these processes are required to be strictly conformant to current regulations and laws. In addition different divisions of the business are interested in different views on the same process: whereas the IT department implementing the processes would like a complete view that shows the underlying business rules and supports all variants, the end users are only in-terested in a local view that (1) shows only the aspects of the process that they are responsible for and (2) only shows the variants of the process that are rel-evant to them. This paper reports on a project we undertook with such a credit institute where we investigated and addressed these issues by providing a hybrid solution, allowing processes to be modelled using our constraint-based modelling tools, but also supporting flow-based views of both the entire process and specific variants