Business Process Management (BPM) - Seminars

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Configurable and Executable Reference Process Models

Marcello La Rosa
PhD Confirmation Seminar

Abstract

A reference process model is a model of day-to-day operations in a given domain such as supply chain management, logistics, human resource management or film production. Reference process models are intended to be configured in a specific context (e.g. for a given organisation), leading to individualised process models. The benefits of configuring reference process models, as opposed to building models from scratch, include reduced modelling effort and increased reuse of proven practices.

Reference process models currently used in commercial practice lack a representation of configuration alternatives, configuration decisions, and relationships between these decisions and alternatives. Several proposals aiming at filling this gap have emerged in the research literature. However, these proposals suffer from various limitations.

Firstly, the configuration of a process model in these approaches requires that stakeholders involved in the configuration have a thorough understanding of both the application domain and the process modeling notation. This assumption is unrealistic in domains where users are unfamiliar with process modeling notations. Second, these approaches focus on control-flow aspects of process models, oversimplifying other aspects such as the data and resources upon which the processes rely. As a result, these approaches do not yield executable process models.

The proposed course of research aims at addressing the above shortcomings by designing, formalizing and validating a configuration framework that covers the entire life cycle of reference process models, from their design to their configuration and their execution in a workflow environment. The framework will incorporate a questionnaire-based approach to facilitate the configuration of reference processes by domain experts. The information gathered from these questionnaires will then be mapped to variants of the reference process model. The result will be a process model that can be executed using a workflow management system such as YAWL.