Now showing 1 - 10 of 28
  • Publication
    RBPMN: the value of roles for business process modeling
    (Springer, 2024)
    Skouti, Tarek
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    Furrer, Frank
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    Strahringer, Susanne
    Business process modeling is essential for organizations to comprehend, analyze, and enhance their business operations. The business process model and notation (BPMN) is a standard widely adopted for illustrating business processes. However, it falls short when modeling roles, interactions, and responsibilities within complex modern processes that involve digital, human, and non-human entities, typically found in cyber-physical systems (CPS). In this paper, we introduce Role-based BPMN (RBPMN), a standard-compliant extension of BPMN 2.0 that distinctly depicts roles and their interactions within business processes. We underscore the value of RBPMN and a role-based context modeling approach through a modeling example in CPS that facilitates the representation of role-based variations in the process flow, namely a production process in a smart factory. Our findings suggest that RBPMN is a valuable BPMN extension that enhances the expressiveness, variability, and comprehensiveness of business process models, especially in complex and context-sensitive processes.
  • Publication
    The biggest business process management problems to solve before we die
    (Elsevier, 2023-01)
    Beerepoot, Iris
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    Ciccio, Claudio Di
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    Reijers, Hajo A.
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    Rinderle-Ma, Stefanie
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    Bandara, Wasana
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    Burattin, Andrea
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    Calvanese, Diego
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    Chen, Tianwa
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    Cohen, Izack
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    Depaire, Benoît
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    Federico, Gemma Di
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    Dumas, Marlon
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    van Dun, Christopher
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    Fehrer, Tobias
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    Fischer, Dominik A.
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    Gal, Avigdor
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    Indulska, Marta
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    Isahagian, Vatche
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    Klinkmüller, Christopher
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    Kratsch, Wolfgang
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    Leopold, Henrik
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    Looy, Amy Van
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    Lopez, Hugo
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    Lukumbuzya, Sanja
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    Mendling, Jan
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    Meyers, Lara
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    Moder, Linda
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    Montali, Marco
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    Muthusamy, Vinod
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    Reichert, Manfred
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    Rizk, Yara
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    Rosemann, Michael
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    Röglinger, Maximilian
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    Sadiq, Shazia
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    Slaats, Tijs
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    Simkus, Mantas
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    Someh, Ida Asadi
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    Weber, Ingo
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    Weske, Mathias
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    It may be tempting for researchers to stick to incremental extensions of their current work to plan future research activities. Yet there is also merit in realizing the grand challenges in one’s field. This paper presents an overview of the nine major research problems for the Business Process Management discipline. These challenges have been collected by an open call to the community, discussed and refined in a workshop setting, and described here in detail, including a motivation why these problems are worth investigating. This overview may serve the purpose of inspiring both novice and advanced scholars who are interested in the radical new ideas for the analysis, design, and management of work processes using information technology.
  • Publication
    An Interactive Method for Detection of Process Activity Executions from IoT Data
    The increasing number of IoT devices equipped with sensors and actuators pervading every domain of everyday life allows for improved automated monitoring and analysis of processes executed in IoT-enabled environments. While sophisticated analysis methods exist to detect specific types of activities from low-level IoT data, a general approach for detecting activity executions that are part of more complex business processes does not exist. Moreover, dedicated information systems to orchestrate or monitor process executions are not available in typical IoT environments. As a consequence, the large corpus of existing process analysis and mining techniques to check and improve process executions cannot be applied. In this work, we develop an interactive method guiding the analysis of low-level IoT data with the goal of detecting higher-level process activity executions. The method is derived following the exploratory data analysis of an IoT data set from a smart factory. We propose analysis steps, sensor-actuator-activity patterns, and the novel concept of activity signatures that are applicable in many IoT domains. The method shows to be valuable for the early stages of IoT data analyses to build a ground truth based on domain knowledge and decisions of the process analyst, which can be used for automated activity detection in later stages.
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  • Publication
    Integrating process management and event processing in smart factories: A systems architecture and use cases
    (Elsevier, 2022-05) ;
    Malburg, Lukas
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    Bergmann, Ralph
    The developments of new concepts for an increased digitization of manufacturing industries in the context of Industry 4.0 have brought about novel system architectures and frameworks for smart production systems. These range from generic frameworks for Industry 4.0 to domain-specific architectures for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). While most of the approaches include a service-based architecture for selective integration with enterprise systems, a close two-way integration of the production control systems and IIoT sensors and actuators with Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS) on the management level for automation and mining of production processes is rarely discussed. This fusion of Business Process Management (BPM) with IIoT can be mutually beneficial for both research areas, but is still in its infancy. We propose a systems architecture for IIoT that shows how to integrate the low-level hardware components–sensors and actuators–of a smart factory with BPM systems. We discuss the software components and their interactions to address challenges of device encapsulation, integration of sensor events, and interaction with existing BPM systems. This integration is demonstrated within several use cases regarding process modeling, automation and mining for a smart factory model, showing benefits of using BPM technologies to analyze, control, and adapt discrete production processes in IIoT.
  • Publication
    HoloFlows: modelling of processes for the Internet of Things in mixed reality
    (Springer, 2021) ;
    Kühn, Romina
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    Korzetz, Mandy
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    Aßmann, Uwe
    Our everyday lives are increasingly pervaded by digital assistants and smart devices forming the Internet of Things (IoT). While user interfaces to directly monitor and control individual IoT devices are becoming more sophisticated and end-user friendly, applications to connect standalone IoT devices and create more complex IoT processes for automating and assisting users with repetitive tasks still require a high level of technical expertise and programming knowledge. Related approaches for process modelling in IoT mostly suggest extensions to complex modelling languages, require high levels of abstraction and technical knowledge, and rely on unintuitive tools. We present a novel approach for end-user oriented--no-code--IoT process modelling using Mixed Reality (MR) technology: HoloFlows. Users are able to explore the IoT environment and model processes among sensors and actuators as first class citizens by simply "drawing" virtual wires among physical IoT devices. MR technology hereby facilitates the understanding of the physical contexts and relations among the IoT devices and provides a new and more intuitive way of modelling IoT processes. The results of a user study comparing HoloFlows with classical modelling approaches show an increased user experience and decrease of required modelling knowledge and technical expertise to create IoT processes.
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    Scopus© Citations 33
  • Publication
    Immersives verteiltes Robotic Co-working
    (Springer, 2020-09-02) ;
    Aßmann, Uwe
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    Grzelak, Dominik
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    Belov, Mikhail
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    Riedel, Paul
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    Podlubne, Ariel
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    Zhao, Wanqi
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    Kerber, Jens
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    Mohr, Jonas
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    Espinosa, Fabio
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    Schwartz, Tim
    Scopus© Citations 1
  • Publication
    Revision of a Smart Factory Software Architecture from Monolith to Microservices
    ( 2024-09) ;
    Malburg, Lukas
    Software architecture plays an important role in the development of modern, complex software systems as it influences a system's quality attributes and ability to grow with future demand. Designing the software architecture of cyber-physical systems (CPS) becomes even more challenging due to their capability of directly influencing the physical world and thus introducing new non-functional requirements related to fault-tolerance, safety, and resource scarcity. Existing research focuses on systems engineering to achieve the vertical integration of CPS with an organization's information systems and processes, but not on software architecture to horizontally extend existing systems with new CPS. In this report we describe the process of revising an existing monolithic software architecture for a smart factory towards a microservices-based architecture to meet these new requirements and prepare the factory to be extended with new CPS. For the revision of the existing architecture, we provide an analysis of its code base before and after changes, a description of the refactoring process, and discuss relevant new nonfunctional requirements and architecture options. We elaborate on the architectural decisions favoring microservices and analyze the new architecture regarding improved quality attributes to evaluate the system.
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  • Publication
    Method to Identify Process Activities by Visualizing Sensor Events
    (Springer, 2022-09)
    Weyers, Flemming
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    With the onset of the Internet of Things (IoT) everyday objects suddenly become data sources equipped with sensors measuring the object’s properties and surroundings. However, the lack of process-awareness in IoT environments (e.g., smart factories) prevents the adoption of more sophisticated process analysis and optimization. One hurdle is the differing abstraction level of low-level sensor data and process-level activities. We propose a method to identify activities step-by-step from raw IoT data using visualizations. By relying on minimal process knowledge, we discover process activities from sensor events. These activities are represented by specific sequences of sensor events–Activity Signatures–that serve as a basis for finding similar activities. We demonstrate the method’s validity with a proof of concept in a smart factory.
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  • Publication
    End-User Development of Internet of Things Processes in Augmented Reality (Extended Abstract)
    With the increasing number of IoT devices pervading our everyday surroundings there also emerges the desire of interlinking devices and creating processes among them for automation purposes. This “programming” of IoT environments currently requires a high level of technical expertise and abstraction capabilities, which hinders end-users from adapting these new technologies. We present HoloFlows–an approach for end-user oriented IoT process development in augmented reality– consisting of a simple modeling language and an intuitive user interface with natural interactions. HoloFlows showed an increased efficiency and user experience as well as steep learning curve for non-experts in a user study and maybe one way of programming the smart home and IoT of the future.