Business Process Management (BPM) - Students

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Mitra Heravizadeh Email: mitra.heravizadeh@gmail.com

Principal Supervisor: Professor Michael Rosemann

Associate Supervisor: Dr Jan Mendling

Expected Completion: Mid 2008

Title: Making Business Processes Context-aware: A Way to Support Knowledge-intensive Tasks

Abstract: In this current research project, we explore innovative ways of providing users involved in the process execution with relevant knowledge previously gained along the business process. The aim is to provide the user with richer information about the context in which the next task has to be executed.

In business processes, knowledge-intensive tasks are ones in which the people performing such tasks are involved in a fair degree of uncertainty. In most knowledge-intensive tasks, the user is required to make judgements or decisions. These people are required to apply and bring together their experience, training, expertise and judgement. In particular, they are concerned about issues or problems that might arise and how these are best dealt with or avoided. Current workflow technology fails to deliver the right information to the user at the right time based on the context of the process instance, thus not taking the opportunity to forewarn users of potential problems. Context-aware business process are a way to overcome shortcomings of workflow management systems (WfMS).

In this research, we would like to use contextual information to bring to bear, to each stage of the execution of a given process, the knowledge that is most appropriate to that stage. We believe that, for a system to be context-aware, there must be a model that provides the means for categorising, naming, storing, retrieving, reasoning with, and the binding of contextual information to tasks.