Business Process Management (BPM) - Seminars


Seminars
	2007 Seminars
		No.1 - Florian Gottschalk
		NO.2 - christoph Riedl
		No.3 - Guy Redding
		No.4 - Michael Parent
		No.5 - Stefan Seidel
		No.6 - Marcello La Rosa
		No.7 - Yuan Ren
		No.8 - Matthias Lange
		No.9 - Jan Recker
		No.10 - Roel Peeters
		No.11 - Erwin Fielt
		No.12 - Nick Russell
		No.13 - Michael Adams
		No.14 - Adam Herne
		No.16 - Daniela Mihailescu
		No.17 - Zoren Milosevic
		No.18 - Remco Dijkman
		No.20 - Jan Mendling
		No.21 - Christian Flender
		No.22 - Juergen Moormann
		No.23 - Dr Barbara Weber
		No.24 - Ksenia Ryndia
		No.25 - Sandy Chong
		No.26 - George Varvaressos & Jerome Pearce
		No.29 - Jan Heck & Thomas Kohlborn
	2006 Seminars
	No. 1 - Stefan Winkens
	No. 2 - Mitra Heravizadeh
	No. 3 - Ingo Weber
	No. 4 - Jamie Cornes
	No. 5 - Gaby Doebeli
	No. 6 - Bob Risson
	No. 7 - Massimiliano de Leoni
	No. 8 - Samia Mazhar & Jerome Caillot
	No. 9 - Roland Holten
	No. 10 - Diana Heckl
	No. 11 - Axel Korthaus
	No. 12 - Ross Brown
	No. 13 - David Burke
	No. 14 - Jan Recker
	No. 15 - Erwin Fielt
	No. 17 - Peter Reimann
	No. 18 - Alan Hevner
	No. 19 - Peter Charmoni
	No. 20 - Allan Mortan
	No. 21 - Andrew Burton-Jones

[Print-friendly version]

Foundations of Progress-Aware Information Systems

Nicholas Russell
PhD Final Seminar

Abstract

At the heart of most successful organisations is the drive to improve efficiency. One of the keys to meeting this objective is understanding what the organisation does and how it could do it better. The notion of the business process has been a key tool in gaining this understanding and in recent years it has underpinned popular approaches to business improvement. More recently, the ubiquity of business processes and their need for ongoing management in the same manner as other corporate assets has been recognised through the establishment of a dedicated research area: Business Process Management (or BPM).

There are a wide range of potential software technologies on which a BPM offering can be founded. Although there is significant variation between these alternatives, they all share one common factor -- their execution occurs on the basis of a business process model -- and consequently, this field of technologies can be termed Process-Aware Information Systems (or PAIS).

This thesis develops a conceptual foundation for process-aware information systems based on the results of a detailed examination of contemporary offerings including workflow and case handling systems, business process modelling languages and web service composition languages. This foundation is based on 128 patterns that identify recurrent core constructs in the control-flow, data and resource perspectives of process-aware information systems. It also proposes a generic graphical language for defining exception handling strategies that span these perspectives. On the basis of these insights, a comprehensive reference language -- newYAWL -- is developed for business process modelling and enactment. This language is formally defined and an abstract syntax and operational semantics are provided for it. An assessment of its capabilities is provided through a comprehensive patterns-based analysis which allows direct comparison of its functionality with other process-aware information systems.