Process modeling languages such as EPCs, BPMN, flow charts, UML activity diagrams, Petri nets, etc.\ are used to model business processes and to configure process-aware information systems. It is known that users have problems understanding these diagrams. In fact, even process engineers and system analysts have difficulties grasping the dynamics implied by a process model. Recent empirical studies show that people make numerous errors when modeling complex business processes, e.g., about 20 percent of the EPCs in the SAP reference model have design flaws resulting in potential deadlocks, livelocks, etc. It seems obvious that the complexity of the model contributes to design errors and a lack of understanding. It is not easy to measure complexity, however. This paper presents three complexity metrics that have been implemented in the process analysis tool ProM. The metrics are defined for a subclass of Petri nets named Workflow nets, but the results can easily be applied to other languages. To demonstrate the applicability of these metrics, we have applied our approach and tool to 262 relatively complex Protos models made in the context of various student projects. This allows us to validate and compare the different metrics. It turns out that our new metric focusing on the structuredness outperforms existing metrics.

Abstract. The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) has become a de-facto standard for executable process specifications. The broad industry acceptance of BPEL forces workflow and BPM system vendors to consider respective import and export interfaces. Yet, several existing systems utilize graph-based BPM languages such as EPCs, Workflow Nets, UML Activity Diagrams, and BPMN in their modeling component while BPEL is rather a block-oriented language inspired by process calculi. In this paper we identify transformation strategies as reusable solutions for mapping control flow between graph-based BPM tools and BPEL. Furthermore, we present a case study in which we have applied these strategies in an industry project. This case study shows that transformation strategies are helpful for implementing import and export interfaces in a systematic way, and that they can easily be extended to address vendor-specific aspects of a graph-based BPM tool.

Abstract. The Adviser Portal (AP) is a new IT system for 15 Danish banks. The main goal of AP is to increase the efficiency and quality of bank advisers' work. Requirements engineering for AP includes describing new work processes that must be supported by AP using a combination of: (1) prose and informal drawings; (2) formal models; (3) graphical animation. This representation helps users and systems analysts to align new work processes and AP via early experiments in a prototyping fashion. The contribution of this paper is to present and reflect upon the analysis and description of one specific, important work process.

Abstract. Care organizations, such as hospitals, need to support complex and dynamic workflows. More- over, many disciplines are involved. This makes it important to avoid the typical disconnect between requirements and the actual implementation of the system. This paper proposes an approach where an Executable Use Case (EUC) and Colored Workflow Net (CWN) are used to close the gap between the given requirements specification and the realization of these requirements with the help of a workflow system. This paper describes a large case study where the diagnostic tra jectory of the gynaecological oncology care process of the Academic Medical Center (AMC) hospital is used as reference process. The process consists of hundreds of activities. These have been modeled and analyzed using an EUC and a CWN. Moreover, based on the CWN, the process has been implemented using four different workflow systems. This shows the applicability of our approach and allows for an evaluation of different approaches towards flexibility in workflow systems. .

Message Sequence Charts (MSCs) are a well known language for specifying scenarios that describe how different actors (e.g., system components, people, or organizations) interact. MSCs are often used as a starting point for software analysts to discuss the behavior of a system with different stakeholders. Often such discussions lead to more complete behavioral models described by e.g. Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs), UML activity diagrams, BPMN models, Petri nets, etc. The contribution of this paper is to present a method that uses process mining to translate a set of MSCs that represent example scenarios into a complete process model, e.g., represented in terms of EPCs or Petri nets. Our approach takes MSCs and translates them into a special kind event logs. Unlike all known process mining techniques, we use a new approach that uses event logs containing explicit causal dependencies. This allows us to discover high-quality process models. The approach has been implemented in the process mining framework ProM.

Abstract. Much recent research work discusses the transformation between different process modelling languages. This work, however, is mainly focussed on specific process modelling languages, and thus the general reusability of the applied transformation concepts is rather limited. In this paper, we aim to abstract from concrete transfor- mation strategies by distinguishing two major paradigms for representing control flow in process modelling languages: block-oriented languages (such as BPEL and BPML) and graph-oriented languages (such as EPCs and YAWL). The contribution of this paper are generic strategies for transforming from block-oriented process languages to graph-oriented languages, and vice versa.

Abstract. The contribution of this paper is a tutorial in the use of BRITNeY animation tool together with CPN Tools to make different views on Coloured Petri Nets. Examples of such views are message- sequence charts, gantt-charts, or SceneBeans animations showing the state of the model. In this paper we will describe how to generate message- sequence charts from executions of Coloured Petri Nets and how to create SceneBeans animations.

Many attempts are done these days to map a collection of UML 2.0 Sequence Charts (SC) into some other process specification. In this paper, we first show how to map SCs to event logs described in Mining XML (MXML). Secondly, we show how the MXML can be converted into a Coloured Petri Net (CPNs), and, finally what various sorts of analysis can be done of the MXML representations of the SCs, using the tool ProM. We are able to generate CPNs for the whole system, for each object, and any combination of objects described in the SCs.

FLOWer is a case handling tool made by Pallas-Athena for process management in the service industry. BPEL on the other hand is a language for web service orchestration, and has become a de facto standard, because of its popularity, for specifying workflow processes even though that was not its original purpose. This paper describe an approach translating BPEL to FLOWer, or more precisely from BPEL to CHIP, where CHIP is the interchange language that FLOWer import from and export to. The aim of the translation scheme that I give is to derive a CHIP specification that is behaviorally equivalent to the original BPEL process.

Abstract. This paper presents WorkflowNet2BPEL4WS a tool to automatically map a graphical workflow model expressed in terms of Workflow Nets (WF-nets) onto BPEL. The Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL) has emerged as the de-facto standard for implementing processes and is supported by an increasing number of systems (cf. the IBM WebSphere Choreographer and the Oracle BPEL Process Manager). While being a powerful language, BPEL is difficult to use. Its XML representation is very verbose and only readable for the trained eye. It offers many constructs and typically things can be implemented in many ways, e.g., using links and the flow construct or using sequences and switches. As a result only experienced users are able to select the right construct. Some vendors offer a graphical interface that generates BPEL code. However, the graphical representations are a direct reflection of the BPEL code and not easy to use by end-users. Therefore, we provide a mapping from WF-nets to BPEL. This mapping builds on the rich theory of Petri nets and can also be used to map other languages (e.g., UML, EPC, BPMN, etc.) onto BPEL. To evaluate Work- flowNet2BPEL4WS we used more than 100 processes modeled using Protos (the most widely used business process modeling tool in the Netherlands), automatically converted these into CPN Tools, and applied our mapping. The results of these evaluation are very encouraging and show the applicability of our approach.

Abstract. Much recent research work discusses the transformation between different process modelling languages. This work, however, is mainly focussed on specific process modelling languages, and thus the general reusability of the applied transformation concepts is rather limited. In this paper, we aim to abstract from concrete transformation strategies by distinguishing two major paradigms for process modelling languages: block-oriented languages (such as BPEL and BPML) and graph-oriented languages (such as EPCs and YAWL). The contribution of this paper are generic strategies for transforming from block-oriented process languages to graph-oriented languages, and vice versa. We also present two case studies of applying our strategies.