Process management and process planning with a special focus on mobility and ubiquity

Due to shifting markets, companies need to adapt or even restructure their business processes frequently. This affects both inter- and intraorganizational processes in order to react to - for instance - changing customer needs and offers of competitors by means of own services. In many of those cases the flexible construction and adaption of process models is a bottleneck. With the increase of mobile and ubiquitous processes that are heavily affected by endogenous (such as, e.g., user preferences) and exogenous influences (such as, e.g., environmental factors) and thus by context information, this bottleneck is expected to further intensify.

Most current process modeling approaches seem only partly suitable with regard to this challenge as the modeling has to be performed manually – although supported by modeling tools – by a modeler. The manual modeling is typically complex and costly even with appropriate knowledge, especially when processes are complex (e.g., when considering context-specific influences) and several company departments or companies are involved. Further, modeling and ongoing maintenance often implies high demands for communication and clarification due to different terminologies of the involved persons.

Within the research area of Semantic Business Process Management a higher degree of automation is discussed when analyzing, designing, implementing and controlling business processes. In this context, we envision the (semi-)automated design and adaptation of process models. As this task can be regarded as a kind of planning problem, it is also referred to as the planning of process models, which consist of both individual actions (PA) and basic and advanced control flow patterns. As part of the work – funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) projects SEMPRO and SEMPRO2 and by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) project “Automated Planning of Process Models” – we have been and are currently working on an approach called SEMPA (SEMantic-based Planning Approach). Figure 1 illustrates the idea: Based on a semantic description of the process domain (ontology) and a library of specified actions (PA), the planner generates feasible process models (i.e., sequences of actions including necessary control flow patterns such as for example an exclusive choice) that meet a given problem definition (consisting of an initial state and one to many goal states). We speak of a (semi-)automated approach, as the planned process models are considered as proposals that afterwards need to be discussed with the experts and assessed regarding (economic) criteria. We currently use UML activity diagrams as a modeling notation. However, it is planned to support further modeling notations (like eEPC or BPMN) in the near future.

Within this research field, we further investigate how context-specific events and information (like e.g. changing weather) could be considered within the planning of process models of mobile and ubiquitous processes. This is a new perspective, as existing works consider them typically during the execution of a process. By means of such a consideration during the planning- or design-phase it becomes possible to identify possible context-events and take into account required adaptions to the process model immediately. Thereby we expect that the amount of unsuccessful process terminations und the related impacts are reduced. The combination with approaches for the selection and realization of mobile services and applications (link) clearly illustrates this advantage.

A selection of current publications:

• Heinrich, Bernd und Schön, Dominik (2015) Automated Planning of context-aware Process Models. In: European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), May 26-29, 2015, Münster, Germany.
• Heinrich, B.; Klier, M.; Lewerenz, L., Zimmermann, S. (2015) Quality of Service-aware Service Selection: A Novel Approach Considering Potential Service Failures and Non-Deterministic Service Values. INFORMS Service Science, A Journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences Vol. 7, No (2015) 1-22.
• Heinrich, Bernd und Lewerenz, Lars (2013) QoS-aware service selection considering potential service failures. In: 11. Internationalen Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik, 27. Februar - 1. März 2013, Leipzig.
• Heinrich, Bernd und Klier, Mathias und Zimmermann, Steffen (2012) Automated Planning of Process Models –Towards a Semantic-based Approach. In: Smolnik, Stefan und Teuteberg, Frank und Thomas, Oliver, (eds.) Semantic technologies for business and information systems engineering: concepts and applications. Business science reference, Hershey, Pa., S. 169-194.
• Heinrich, Bernd und Zimmermann, S. (2012) Granularity Metrics for IT Services. In: 33rd International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), December 16-19, 2012, Orlando/Florida, USA.
• Heinrich, Bernd und Klier, Mathias und Zimmermann, Steffen (2011) Automatisierte Modellierung, Umsetzung und Ausführung von Prozessen – Ein Web Service-basiertes Konzept. In: 10. Internationale Tagung Wirtschaftsinformatik, 16. - 18. Februar 2011, Zürich, Schweiz.
• Heinrich, Bernd und Henneberger, Matthias und Krammer, Alexander und Lautenbacher, Florian (2011) Granularity of Services – an Economic Analysis. Business & Information Systems Engineering 3 (6), S. 345-358.
• Heinrich, Bernd und Bolsinger, Manuel und Bewernik, Marc (2009) Automated planning of process models: the construction of exclusive choices. In: 30th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS), 2009, Phoenix, Arizona, USA.
• Heinrich, Bernd und Bewernik, Marc-Andre und Henneberger, Matthias und Krammer, Alexander und Lautenbacher, Florian (2008) SEMPA – Ein Ansatz des Semantischen Prozessmanagements zur Planung von Prozessmodellen. Wirtschaftsinformatik 50 (6), S. 445-460.
• Henneberger, Matthias und Heinrich, Bernd und Lautenbacher, Florian und Bauer, Bernhard (2008) Semantic-Based Planning of Process Models. In: Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik (MKWI), 2008, München
• Bernd Heinrich, Mathias Klier, Steffen Zimmermann, Automated Planning of Process Models: Design of a Novel Approach to Construct
  Exclusive Choices, Decision Support Systems, Volume 78, October 2015, Pages 1–14, ISSN 0167-9236, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.dss.2015.07.005