Business Process Management (BPM) - Students

[Print-friendly version]

Marcello La Rosa Email: m.larosa@qut.edu.au

Principal Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Marlon Dumas

Associate Supervisors: Prof. Arthur ter Hofstede, Dr. Jan Mendling

Expected Completion: November 2008 

Title: Configurable and Executable Reference Process Models

Abstract:

A reference process model is an integrated representation of multiple variants of a business process in a given domain (e.g. supply chain management or screen business), which is designed to be individualized to meet the requirements of a specific organization or project. The benefits of configuring reference process models, as opposed to building models from scratch, include reduced modeling 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. Secondly, 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 defining a holistic approach for the configuration of reference process models, from their design towards their execution in a workflow environment. The study investigates: i) the alignment of the configured process models with the business requirements of the domain, ii) the preservation of the model correctness during configuration and iii) the improvement of configuration expressiveness.

To know more about my PhD, and for a complete list of publications, please visit the Process Configuration website.

My personal page, including the updated CV, can be found here.