This paper addresses the following problem: given two business process models, create a process model that is the union of the process models given as input. In other words, the behavior of the produced process model should encompass that of the input models. The paper describes an algorithm that produces a single configurable process model from a pair of process models. The algorithm works by ...

Business-process management (BPM) is nowadays a key technology for the automation and support of processes in medium-sized and large organizations. This technology has been successfully applied to business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce since the ’90s, and it is now being applied also in e-government for the management of administrative procedures. As stated in Aals...

Business process models are used within a range of organizational initiatives, where every stakeholder has a unique perspective on a process and demands the respective model. As a consequence, multiple process models capturing the very same business process coexist. Keeping such models in sync is a challenge within an ever changing business environment: once a process is changed, all its models...

Traditional centralized business process management approaches pose difficulties in coping with rapid changes and evolving process models. We developed the Plural method to allow for decentralized modeling of processes. The Plural method enables process participants, rather than a centralized group of process engineers or managers, to model and maintain their processes. In previous works, we in...

Business processes support the modeling and the implementation of software as workflows of local and inter-process activities. Taking over structuring and composition, evolution has become a central concern in software development. We advocate it should be taken into account as soon as the modeling of business processes, which can thereafter be made executable using process engines or model-to-...

Computer simulation attempts to “mimic” real-life or hypothetical behavior on a computer to see how processes or systems can be improved and to predict their performance under different circumstances. Simulation has been successfully applied in many disciplines and is considered to be a relevant and highly applicable tool in Business Process Management (BPM). Unfortunately, in reality the use o...

Traditional development approaches (particularly in fixed price, outsourced projects) are normally based on a contractuallyfixed set of requirements and relatively heavy change-control processes. Movements in the IT industry to formulate new development approaches to match more realistic business scenarios where requirements are continually refined and updated in the course of a project, have r...

In the current economy, a shift can be seen from stand-alone business organizations to networks of tightly collaborating business organizations. To allow this tight collaboration, business process management in these collaborative networks is becoming increasingly important. This paper discusses automated support for this networked business process management: automated means to manage business...

Business processes and workflows are crucial elements in the design and development of commercial systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or e-commerce systems and many more. Despite their important role there are little means to ensure the correctness of these processes and workflows as well as consistency between them. In contrast to other verification problems the semantics of bu...