BPM techniques are becoming more widely used, and there are more and more business process models and instances emerging. In this demonstration, we show how to manage large scale of process models and instances with Process Space. Creating, importing, storing, indexing and querying of models and instances will be exhibited. Since online tools for managing massive process instances are very rare, we focus on showing our useful tool of exploring process instances.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 we study related work, before we introduce the implementation of our work in Section 3. The management of process instances is presented in Section 4. In Section 5, we show our demonstration and conclude the paper. 2
BeehiveZ [
Nearly all the functions in BeehiveZ have been integrated and extended into our new online tool Process Space.
Oryx Oryx2 is a web-based editor for modeling business processes in various
languages like BPMN, EPC and Petri net. It is an open platform for developments
regarding process modeling. Oryx is a project of the University of Potsdam.
Some source codes of Oryx are modi ed and imported into Process Space.
Disco Disco3 is a stand-alone applications designed and developed by Fluxicon
for process mining and analysis on event logs. In the design of process execution
analysis module of Process Space, we get a lot of inspiration from chart display
methods in Disco. Compared to Disco, Process Space is an open web application
which can handle large scale event logs and supporting third-party plugins.
Business process model query There have already been several research
prototypes on business process model query. BPMN-Q [
Process Space is a Brower/Server application implemented in Java. As shown in Figure 1, it includes four major modules, which are process model analyzer, process monitor, process instance analyzer and process data repository. For space limitation, we omit the detail description.
on event log, instance data is reconstructed and saved into database. We can easily view and move event logs with a friendly interface.
Querying instances Common instance querying examples are mainly based on length of activites, time consuming of activities, activity categories and adjacent activities. These four types of queries are all supported in Process Space. { Length of activities refers to the number of activities in a process instance.
When a user wants to query instances whose length is equal to, or larger than, or between some given values, this type of query would be used. { Time consuming of activities refers to the cost of time from the execution of rst activity to last activity in an instance. This is helpful in situations like querying instances completed within a given period of time. { Activity category index is designed to solve problems when a user is interesting in instances containing speci c types of activities. { Adjacent activities refers to two activities whose execution is in sequential order in a process instance. This type of query is ultilized to search instances with a given sequential structure.
In order to meet the requirement of user-de ned instance index, we have designed third-party interfaces. Users can implement their own indexing algorithms and upload them onto Process Space. Once uploaded algorithms have been checked and granted, they will come into operation in the system.
Process Space uses Lucene8, a Java-based indexing and search technology developed by Apache, as indexing engine. Moreover, we use mongo-lucene9, a MongoDB-backed lucene directory for a scalable real-time search, to save indexing data into MongoDB and manage them with Lucene at the same time.
We use large scale of auto-generated models and instances to test the performance of index module. With the scale of models and instances enlarging, the time of inserting, indexing and querying keeps increasing and maintains a linear relationship with the scale, as shown in Figure 2. Experimental results show that the index module has an excellent performance.
Process execution analysis and visualization display Like Disco, Process Space implements three major types of process execution analysis, instance overview, activity statistics and resource statistics. Line charts and pie charts are the two types of methods to represent the analysis results. 5
What will be shown in the demo? We will demonstrate the usage of Process Space and focus on the management of process instances, including importing event log, instance overview, indexing and querying, and anaylsis. We will use industrial event logs from di erent enterprises and massive arti cial event logs as examples. Through the demonstration on the example event logs, we can see the management of instances is very friendly and e cient and the query performance is good with use of indexes.
Signi cance in BPM area. This demonstration shows a process model and instance management tool called Process Space and how to manage process instances e ciently and e ectively with it. It is helpful for e cient management and analysis of business process data.
Acknowledgements. The work is supported by the National Science Foundation of China (No.61472207 & No.61003099), the Ministry of Education & China Mobile Research Foundation (MCM20123011) and the special fund for innovation of Shandong, China No. 2013CXC30001.