=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2839/paper3
|storemode=property
|title=Towards Real-Time Progress Determination of Object-Aware Business Processes
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2839/paper3.pdf
|volume=Vol-2839
|authors=Lisa Arnold,Marius Breitmayer,Manfred Reichert
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/zeus/ArnoldBR21
}}
==Towards Real-Time Progress Determination of Object-Aware Business Processes==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2839/paper3.pdf
Towards Real-Time Progress Determination of
Object-Aware Business Processes
Lisa Arnold, Marius Breitmayer and Manfred Reichert
Institute of Databases and Information Systems, Ulm University, Germany
{lisa.arnold, marius.breitmayer, manfred.reichert}@uni-ulm.de
Abstract. To stay competitive, companies need to continuously im-
prove and evolve their business processes. In this endeavour, business
process optimisations and improvements are key elements. In particu-
lar, the monitoring of business processes enables the early discovery of
problems and errors already during process enactment. Two approaches
can be pursued to achieve this: real-time, also called online monitoring,
and offline monitoring. A subtask of real-time monitoring is to determine
the current progress of a business process, which is particularly challeng-
ing if the latter is composed of loosely coupled, smaller processes that
interact with each other, like object lifecycle processes in data-centric
approaches to BPM, which result in large process structures. This posi-
tion paper discusses the challenges of determining the progress of such
object-aware processes in real-time and defines research questions that
need to be investigated in further work.
Keywords: object-aware business process, process monitoring, progress
determination, online/real-time monitoring
1 Introduction
Object-aware business processes consist of interacting objects whose relations
are defined in a relational process structure [1]. Each object has attributes and
a lifecycle process describing its behaviour [2], whereas coordination processes
structure and control the interactions between multiple lifecycle processes, i.e.,
the overall business process [3]. Lifecycle processes comprise states (including
exactly one start and at least one end state), and state transitions. Each state,
in turn, consists of connected steps, where each step corresponds to an attribute
update operation. Based on this information, electronic forms are auto-generated
during lifecycle execution for each state. As an example, Figure 2 shows a life-
cycle process with one decision step. In general, an object-aware business pro-
cess is composed of multiple lifecycle processes of the same or different type,
resulting in a dynamically evolving process structure during runtime. In this
context, a variety of configurations and constellations of object-aware processes
(i.e., lifecycle and coordination processes), running concurrently to each other,
becomes possible [3]. Additionally, there are coordination constraints between
objects that require interactions between the corresponding lifecycles. Due to
J. Manner, S. Haarmann, S. Kolb, N. Herzberg, O. Kopp (Eds.): 13th ZEUS Workshop,
ZEUS 2021, Bamberg, held virtually due to Covid-19 pandemic, Germany, 25-26 February 2021,
published at http://ceur-ws.org
Copyright © 2020 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Real-Time Progress Determination of Object-Aware Business Processes 15
Fig. 1. Lifecycle structure in step-based view
this high complexity, there is no intuitive solution for monitoring and measuring
the progress of an object-aware business process and the corresponding process
structure respectively.
Several challenges to determine and define progress metrics in object-aware
process management exist. First, no known measures for object-aware progress
exists. Second, progress can be interpreted in different ways. Often, it is described
as fundamental improvement through significant changes of the current status.
In general, however, there is no broadly accepted definition of the term progress.
Third, measuring points for determining the progress of an object-aware busi-
ness process are missing. Fourth, to determine the progress the current execution
status as well as the path yet to be taken (including all routing decisions) are
required. Fifth, a time delay in the calculation of the progress or problems in
estimating the execution path can occur. Thus, we need to define metrics for
determining the progress of an object-aware process in all possible constella-
tions. In addition, the progress of many individual processes (i.e., lifecycles and
coordination process) needs to be properly merged to determine overall progress.
2 Related Work
In [4], an approach to measure the progress of activity-centric business models
is discussed. An approach for monitoring processes and predicting their progress
with data state transition events is presented in [5]. In turn, [6] improves progress
in activity-centric processes using object state transition [5]. By contrast, no
approaches exist for determining progress in object-aware business process man-
agement. Progress measurement of processes in other fields than BPM can be
found, for example, in construction [7], software engineering [8], and software
management [9].
3 Research Questions
As a first step towards the online progress calculation of an object-aware process,
it must be possible to determine the progress of any snapshot of this process.
16 Lisa Arnold et al.
Moreover, the total progress of the object-aware process (i.e., the overall business
process) is determined by the progress of its individual lifecycles. In a nutshell,
any approach for determining the progress of an object-aware process needs to
answer the following research questions:
Research Question 1 How can the progress of a single lifecycle process with
its state-based view form be determined?
Research Question 2 How can the progress of the processing of a single
state within a lifecycle process be measured?
Research Question 3 How can the progress of multiple, interacting (i.e.,
interrelated) lifecycles be determined?
Research Question 4 How does a coordination process affect the progress
of an object-aware business process?
Research Question 1 considers single lifecycle processes in their abstracted
(i.e., state-based) view, whereas Research Question 2 deals with determining the
intra-state progress. Answering Research Questions 1 and 2 will enable us to fully
determine the progress of a lifecycle. For example, for every lifecycle depicted
in Figure 2, a progress between 0 (i.e., instantiation of a lifecycle) and 100 (i.e.,
execution of an end state and lifecycle completion) may be assigned. Research
Question 3 extends progress determination to a full relational process structure
consisting of multiple interacting lifecycle processes (see Figure 2). The latter
form a large process structure whose overall progress needs to be determined.
Research Question 4 considers the coordination (depicted as dashed arrows in
Figure 2) of the relational process structure to refine Research Question 3. With
Research Question 4 the total progress of object-aware business processes can
be addressed. All four research questions need to be answered to be able to
determine the total progress of an object-aware business process.
Fig. 2. Complex structure of an object-aware business process
Real-Time Progress Determination of Object-Aware Business Processes 17
4 Conclusions
This position paper discussed the challenges to be tackled when determining the
progress of object-aware processes and the potentially very large lifecycle process
structure emerging during their execution. As a major benefit of being able to
determine the progress of object-based business processes, the real-time mon-
itoring of the underlying large process structures becomes possible. Although
just-in-time business scenarios are common in many business areas, contempo-
rary business process management tools do not provide a sufficient and timely
measurement of the progress of the emerging process structures. Due to the
complex structure, research questions were addressed, which should be clarified
in further work. Thereby, approaches based on graph theory can be considered
for discussing the presented research questions. The results can be refined us-
ing event log data in combination with approaches from probability theory and
machine learning. In this way, the results of decision steps as well as the total
workload necessary of a process can be predicted to determine the progress more
accurately.
Acknowledgement. This work is part of the ZAFH Intralogistik, funded by the
European Regional Development Fund and the Ministry of Science, Research and
Arts of Baden-Württemberg, Germany (F.No. 32-7545.24-17/12/1).
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