Process-aware Information Systems Research Articles

Process-aware information systems: bridging people and software through process technology

In the last 10 years, there has been an explosion in the number of technologies, standards, and tools to provide process support. The book provides a unified and comprehensive overview of the principles, techniques and technologies underlying the emerging discipline of process aware information systems engineering. It brings together contributions from leading experts in this fast-growing field. Each chapter ends with a collection of thought-provoking exercises, which also makes it ideal as a text book. The book closes with a list of resources including suggested readings as well as URLs of relevantstandardization bodies, initiatives, and consortia

BRIDGING THE GAP BETWEEN BUSINESS MODELS AND WORKFLOW SPECIFICATIONS

This paper presents a methodology to bridge the gap between business process modeling and workflow specification. While the first is concerned with intuitive descriptions that are mainly used for communication, the second is concerned with configuring a process-aware information system, thus requiring a more rigorous language less suitable for communication. Unlike existing approaches the gap is not bridged by providing formal semantics for an informal language. Instead it is assumed that the desired behavior is just a subset of the full behavior obtained using a liberal interpretation of the informal business process modeling language. Using a new correctness criterion (relaxed soundness), it is verified whether a selection of suitable behavior is possible. The methodology consists of five steps and is illustrated using event-driven process chains as a business process modeling language and Petri nets as the workflow specification language.

Advances in business process management

This special issue of Data & Knowledge Engineering contains extended versions of four papers selected from the best papers of the ‘‘International Conference on Business Process Management: On the Application of Formal Methods to Process-Aware Information Systems’’ that took place in Eindhoven (The Netherlands) in June 2003. To put the contributions to this special issue into a wider perspective, we first provide a brief overview of the scientific and practical issues in the context of Business Process Management (BPM) systems, followed by a brief introduction of the selected papers.