Business processes are central to the operation of both public and private organizations. As it becomes increasingly useful for organizations to work in a process-oriented manner, it becomes common nowadays to see organizations building repositories that store large collections of business process models encapsulating the knowledge of their business. In practice, large collections of process models introduce both new challenges and opportunities to the area of business process management. On the one hand, organizations struggle to manage the large volumes of complex process models, which is made worse by overlapping content across models, poor version management, process models that are used simultaneously for different purposes, and the use of different modeling notations such as EPCs, BPMN, within the same collection. On the other hand, the process models in large repositories provide a valuable source of information, which can be reused to facilitate the development of new process models. This reuse will lead to more efficient development of models that are of higher quality and better integrated with the existing models in the collection. For these reasons, the interest in techniques for managing large collections of business process models has been increasing strongly over the past few years. This is illustrated by the number of publications on the topic, which has been growing exponentially over the past few years. In addition, there have been several workshops, a special issue of Computers in Industry and a book that is now being prepared on the topic.
The aim of this tutorial is to provide a comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art of the research techniques and systems for dealing with the challenges and opportunities of effective management of large collections of business process models. In addition, it will provide an overview of open research challenges that currently exist in this area.
Remco Dijkman is assistant professor in Information Systems at Eindhoven
University of Technology. His research interests include Business Process
Management and Service Oriented Computing. He received his Ph.D. from the
University of Twente, where he has held positions as a postdoctoral
researcher and as a research assistant. Before working at the University
of Twente, he combined work as a research assistant at the Open University
of the Netherlands with work as a consultant at Ordina. He has been a
visitor of New York University, Hasso Plattner Institute, IBM Zurich
Research Lab, Humboldt-University Berlin, and Queensland University of
Technology. Remco has published over 60 papers in scientific journals,
conferences and workshops. His work appeared in Information Systems,
Computers in Industry and Transactions on Software Engineering and
Methodology. He is co-founder of the Dutch BPM Round Table and the
European BPM Round Table, both platforms that stimulate collaboration
between researchers and practitioners.
Sherif Sakr is a Senior Researcher in the Software Systems Research Group
at National ICT Australia (NICTA), Sydney, Australia. He is also a
conjoint Senior Lecturer in The School of Computer Science and Engineering
(CSE) at University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia. In 2011, Sherif
held a Visiting Researcher position at Microsoft Research Laboratories,
Redmond, USA. In 2012, Sherif held a Research MTS position in
Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs. He has published more than 60 refereed research
publications in international journals and conferences such as: VLDB,
SIGMOD, WWW, CIKM, BPM, ER, ISWC, DASFAA, ICWS, JCSS, IEEE TSC, IEEE COMST
JCST, JDM and ACM Computing Surveys. Dr. Sakr's research interest is data
and information management in general, particularly in areas of indexing
techniques, query processing and optimization techniques, graph data
management, business process management and semantic Web.