DFF Project Description Hybrid Business Process Management Technologies

Business Process Management (BPM) [11, 24, 26] is an area of computer science that focuses on studying all aspects of the processes that underlie organizations. A process is typically defined as a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market [5] and can be anything from the assembly of a car in a factory to the treatment of a patient in a hospital. IT plays a big role in the management of such processes: we use software to design, execute and analyse processes and use formal methods from computer science to model our processes unambiguously, allowing us to prove formal correctness properties (e.g. checking that a process model does not contain dead-ends) and design algorithms to improve our processes (e.g. finding the most efficient way of fulfilling the requirements of the process model). [1, 2, 10, 15, 25] Traditionally, BPM practitioners have used flow-based process notations [23] which describe the order of work as a flow between activities. Such notations are considered suitable for structured work, such as manufacturing processes, because they directly visualize the possible steps in the process and how to proceed from one to the next. However, it has been observed that these notations fall short when one needs to model flexible processes that allow for a large degree of variability: modelling all possible choices as a flow diagram leads to so-called spaghetti models, which contain too many nodes and edges to be understandable by the users. It has been proposed that in these cases it is best to directly model the business rules that give rise to the process using constraint-based notations [12, 19] and then derive the possible steps from those rules when executing the process. While there is a significant body of work on constraint-based notations, there has as-of-yet been little adoption by industry. In [20] we investigated this issue through a seminar with BPM practitioners where we discovered that they were wary of changing towards the new constraint-based notations because it requires them to make a significant paradigm switch: instead of modelling in terms of the control-flow, they need to model their process in terms of business rules. However, they were interested in combining the new techniques and benefits it offers with the flow-based paradigm that they are used to. We therefore proposed that investigating such hybrid approaches is a worthwhile field of research on its own with many open research questions. The proposal has met with enthusiasm from the academic BPM community and several other researchers have started looking at some of the open questions we identified. [3, 6, 7, 27] Finally, a new area of the BPM field, called process mining [22], has gained prominence over