Mathias Weske – författare

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2018, held in Sydney, Australia, in September 2018.

The 27 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 140 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: reflections on BPM; concepts and methods in business process modeling and analysis; foundations of process discovery; alignments and conformance checking; process model analysis and machine learning; digital process innovation; and method analysis and selection.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the BPM Forum held during the 16th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2018, which took place in Sydney, Australia, in September 2018.

The BPM Forum hosts innovative research which has a high potential of stimulating discussions. The papers selected for the forum are expected to showcase fresh ideas from exciting and emerging topics in BPM, even if they are not yet as mature as the regular papers at the conference.

The 14 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 113 submissions. They were organized according to the tracks of the conference: foundations; engineering; management. 

Business process management is usually treated from two different perspectives: business administration and computer science. While business administration professionals tend to consider information technology as a subordinate aspect for experts to handle, by contrast computer scientists often consider business goals and organizational regulations as terms that do not deserve much thought but require the appropriate level of abstraction.

Mathias Weske argues that the communities involved need to share a common understanding of the principles underlying business process management. To this end, he develops an overall picture that describes core BPM concepts and technologies and explains their relationships. This picture covers high-level business aspects like business goals, strategies, and value chains, but it concentrates on process modeling techniques and process enactment platforms, taking into account the different stakeholders involved.

After starting with a presentation of general foundations, process orchestrations and process choreographies are covered. Based on control flow patterns, concrete process languages are introduced in a concise manner, including Workflow nets, Event-driven Process Chains, Yet Another Workflow Language, and the Business Process Modeling Notation. The various stages during the design and implementation of process choreographies are discussed. Different soundness properties are investigated in a chapter on formal aspects of business processes. Finally, he investigates concrete architectures to enact business processes, including workflow management architectures, case handling architectures and service-oriented architectures. He also shows how standards like SOAP, WSDL, and BPEL fit into the picture.

This textbook is ideally suited for classes on business process management, information systems architecture, and workflow management. It is also valuable for project managers and IT professionals working in business process management, since it provides a vendor-independent view on the topic. The accompanying website www.bpm-book.com contains further information, such as links to references that are available online, exercises that offer the reader a deeper involvement with the topics addressed, and additional teaching material.

Service-oriented computing has recently gained extensive momentum in both industry and academia, and major software vendors hook on to the service paradigm and tailor their software systems towards services in order to accommodate ever-changing process and product requirements in today’s dynamic market environments. While dynamic binding of services at runtime was identified as a core functionality of service-based environments as far back as 2000, its industrial-strength implementation has yet to be achieved. The main reason for this is the lack of rich service specifications, concepts, and tools to process them.

This book introduces advanced concepts in service provisioning and service engineering, including semantic concepts, dynamic discovery and composition, and illustrates them in a concrete business use case scenario. To prove the validity of the concepts and technologies, a semantic service provisioning reference architecture framework as well as a prototypical implementation of its subsystems and a prototypical realization of a proper business scenario are presented. Thus the book goes way beyond current service-based software technologies by providing a coherent and consistent set of technologies and systems functionality that realizes advanced concepts in service provisioning.

Both the use case scenario and the provisioning platform have already been substantiated and implemented by the EU-funded Adaptive Services Grid project. The book therefore presents state-of-the-art research results that have already passed a real industrial implementation evaluation which is based on the work of over 20 European partners cooperating in the field of semantic service provisioning.

Business process management is usually treated from two different perspectives: business administration and computer science. While business administration professionals tend to consider information technology as a subordinate aspect in business process management for experts to handle, by contrast computer science professionals often consider business goals and organizational regulations as terms that do not deserve much thought but require the appropriate level of abstraction.

Matthias Weske argues that all communities involved need to have a common understanding of the different aspects of business process management. To this end, he details the complete business process lifecycle from the modeling phase to process enactment and improvement, taking into account all different stakeholders involved. After starting with a presentation of general foundations and abstraction models, he explains concepts like process orchestrations and choreographies, as well as process properties and data dependencies. Finally, he presents both traditional and advanced business process management architectures, covering, for example, workflow management systems, service-oriented architectures, and data-driven approaches. In addition, he shows how standards like WfMC, SOAP, WSDL, and BPEL fit into the picture.

This textbook is ideally suited for classes on business process management, information systems architecture, and workflow management. This 2nd edition contains major updates on BPMN Version 2 process orchestration and process choreographies, and the chapter on BPM methodologies has been completely rewritten. The accompanying website www.bpm-book.com contains further information and additional teaching material.