Towards Business Process Models at Runtime

Business Process Management (BPM) suffers from inadequate concepts and tools for monitoring and evaluation of process executions at runtime. Conversely, models at runtime promise to give insights into the state of a software system using the abstract and concrete appearance of design time process models. Therefore, we at first advocate to use models at runtime in business process (BP) modeling. Then, we outline the implementation of a prototypical modeling framework for BP runtime models based on metaprogramming. This framework supports the integration of BP type models – models that are enhanced with statistics of runtime data – and instance models – visual representations of executed BPs – resulting in versatile process monitoring dashboards. The approach is superior to object-oriented programming, as it provides a common representation for models and code at various levels of classification, and represents an attractive alternative to object-oriented languages for the implementation of runtime models in general.