Configurable Process Models: Experiences from a Municipality Case Study

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

2013

Self Cite

Abstract. Recent breakthroughs in process mining research make it possible to discover, analyze, and improve business processes based on event data. The growth of event data provides many opportunities but also imposes new challenges. Process mining is typically done for an isolated well-defined process in steady-state. However, the boundaries of a process may be fluid and there is a need to continuously view event data from different angles. This paper proposes the notion of process cubes where events and process models are organized using different dimensions. Each cell in the process cube corresponds to a set of events and can be used to discover a process model, to check conformance with respect to some process model, or to discover bottlenecks. The idea is related to the well-known OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) data cubes and associated operations such as slice, dice, roll-up, and drill-down. However, there are also significant differences because of the process-related nature of event data. For example, process discovery based on events is incomparable to computing the average or sum over a set of numerical values. Moreover, dimensions related to process instances (e.g. cases are split into gold and silver customers), subprocesses (e.g. acquisition versus delivery), organizational entities (e.g. backoffice versus frontoffice), and time (e.g., 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013) are semantically different and it is challenging to slice, dice, roll-up, and drill-down process mining results efficiently.

Section: Computing Sublogs and Models Per Cellmentioning

confidence: 99%

Process Cubes: Slicing, Dicing, Rolling Up and Drilling Down Event Data for Process Mining

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

2013

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“…Such models focus on training and documentation rather than enactment. Configurable process models [18][19][20][21]32] can be seen as executable reference models. Since they are actively used to support processes, they need to be correct.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ensuring correctness during process configuration via partner synthesis

Lohmann

Rosa

2012

Information Systems

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Variants of the same process can be encountered within one organization or across different organizations. For example, different municipalities, courts, and rental agencies all need to support highly similar processes. In fact, procurement and sales processes can be found in almost any organization. However, despite these similarities, there is also the need to allow for local variations in a controlled manner. Therefore, many academics and practitioners have advocated the use of configurable process models (sometimes referred to as reference models). A configurable process model describes a family of similar process models in a given domain. Such a model can be configured to obtain a specific process model that is subsequently used to handle individual cases, for instance, to process customer orders. Process configuration is notoriously difficult as there may be all kinds of interdependencies between configuration decisions. In fact, an incorrect configuration may lead to behavioral issues such as deadlocks and livelocks. To address this problem, we present a novel verification approach inspired by the "operating guidelines" used for partner synthesis. We view the configuration process as an external service, and compute a characterization of all such services which meet particular requirements via the notion of configuration guideline. As a result, we can characterize all feasible configurations (i. e., configurations without behavioral problems) at design time, instead of repeatedly checking each individual configuration while configuring a process model.

“…In principle, they all execute variants of the same set of processes [3], [5]. For example, they all support processes related to building permits, such as the process handling applications for permits and the process for handling objections against such permits.…”

Section: Process Configurationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is also very easy to merge different C-nets into an overarching Cnet that allows for all behavior possible in the individual nets. This in stark contrast with more traditional notations for which it is far from trivial to fold a set of variants into a configurable model [5]. The verification of configurable models and their configurations is also difficult as such models implicitly describe families of models [6], [7].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Business Process Configuration in the Cloud: How to Support and Analyze Multi-tenant Processes?

2011 IEEE Ninth European Conference on Web Services

2011

Abstract-Lion's share of cloud research has been focusing on performance related problems. However, cloud computing will also change the way in which business processes are managed and supported, e.g., more and more organizations will be sharing common processes. In the classical setting, where product software is used, different organizations can make ad-hoc customizations to let the system fit their needs. This is undesirable, especially when multiple organizations share a cloud infrastructure. Configurable process models enable the sharing of common processes among different organizations in a controlled manner. This paper discusses challenges and opportunities related to business process configuration. Causal nets (C-nets) are proposed as a new formalism to deal with these challenges, e.g., merging variants into a configurable model is supported by a simple union operator. C-nets also provide a good representational bias for process mining, i.e., process discovery and conformance checking based on event logs. In the context of cloud computing, we focus on the application of C-nets to cross-organizational process mining.