Business process management employs process models and event logs to represent the behavior of the information systems under study. Traditional case-centric notions consider the order of activities and events in isolated process instances. The emerging field of object-centric processes challenges this assumption by putting objects in the center. Object-centric process mining and modeling approaches identify the structure of co-evolving data objects that influence the behavior of an information system to provide a comprehensive view of the system behavior. Object-centricity has been investigated independently in process modeling and in process mining, which resulted in the coexistence of seemingly contradictory assumptions and definitions. As a community effort, this research manifesto relates and aligns existing terminologies, definitions, and perspectives to provide a common ground for current and future research in object-centric business process management. Based on the current state of research, we propose a conceptualization that sets process models and event logs in relation to the information system’s behavior and the execution data it generates. The conceptualization aims at aligning different terminologies and, thus, providing a basis to model and analyze behavioral characteristics. Building on this common ground, we identify open research challenges along the most relevant research areas in object-centric process management. For each research area, its current status is investigated and an outline of the most relevant research challenges is presented.

Petri nets are a popular formalism for modeling and analyzing distributed systems. Tokens in Petri net models can represent the control flow state or resources produced/consumed by transition firings. We define a resource as a part (a submultiset) of Petri net markings and call two resources equivalent when replacing one of them with another in any marking does not change the observable Petri net behavior. We consider resource similarity and resource bisimilarity, two congruent restrictions of bisimulation equivalence on Petri net markings. Previously it was proved that resource similarity (the largest congruence included in bisimulation equivalence) is undecidable. Here we present an algorithm for checking resource bisimilarity, thereby proving that this relation (the largest congruence included in bisimulation equivalence that is a bisimulation) is decidable. We also give an example of two resources in a Petri net that are similar but not bisimilar.

In this paper we study how it is possible to control Petri net behavior using priority and time constraints. Controlling here means forcing a process to behave in a stable way by associating priorities, or time intervals to transitions and hence transforming a classic Petri net into a Petri net with priorities, or a Time Petri net. For Petri net models stability is often ensured by liveness and boundedness. These properties are crucial in many application areas, e.g. workflow modeling, embedded systems design, and bioinformatics. The paper deals with the problem of transforming a given live, but unbounded Petri net into a live and bounded one by adding transition constraints. We extend the previously proposed priority solution and compare the ability to find solutions with priority and time constraints for a given Petri net.

Nested Petri nets (NP-nets) is an extension of the Petri nets formalism within the “nets-within-nets” approach. Due to tokens with individual behavior and the mechanism of synchronization NP-nets are convenient for modeling multi-agent and adaptive systems, flexible workflow nets, and other systems with mobile interacting components and dynamic structure. In contrast to classical Petri nets, there is still a lack of analysis methods for NP-nets. In this paper we show, that the classical Petri nets analysis technique based on place invariants can be extended to NP-nets. This paper defines place invariants of NP-nets, which link several NP-net components and allow to prove crucial behavioral properties directly from the NP-net structure. An algorithm for computing NP-net invariants is presented and illustrated with an example of EJB system verification.

In this paper we examine how it is possible to control Petri net behavior with the help of transition priorities. Controlling here means forcing a process to behave in a stable way by ascribing priorities to transitions and hence transforming a classic Petri net into a Priority Petri net. For Petri net models stability is often ensured by liveness and boundedness. These properties are crucial in many application areas, e.g. workflow modeling, embedded systems design, and bioinformatics. In this paper we study the problem of transforming a given live, but unbounded Petri net into a live and bounded one by adding priority constraints. We specify necessary conditions for the solvability of this problem and present an algorithm for ascribing priorities to net transitions in such a way that the resulting net becomes bounded while staying live.

Modern information systems produce tremendous amounts of event data. The area of process mining deals with extracting knowledge from this data. Real-life processes can be effectively discovered, analyzed and optimized with the help of mature process mining techniques. There is a variety of process mining case studies and experience reports from such business areas as healthcare, public, transportation and education. Although nowadays, these techniques are mostly used for discovering business processes.

Modern companies continue investing more and more in the creation, maintenance and change of software systems, but the proper specification and design of such systems continues to be a challenge. The majority of current approaches either ignore real user and system runtime behavior or consider it only informally. This leads to a rather prescriptive top-down approach to software development.

Process mining is a relatively new field of computer science which deals with process discovery and analysis based on event logs. In this work we consider the problem of discovering workflow nets with cancellation regions from event logs. Cancellatio

In this work we consider modeling of services with workflow modules, which form a Petri net subclass. The service compatibility problem is to answer the question, whether two services fit together, i.e. whether the composed system is correct. We stud

Resource-driven automata (RDA) are finite automata, sitting in the nodes of a finite system net and asynchronously consuming/producing shared resources through input/output system ports (arcs of the system net). RDAs themselves may be resources for e

Nested Petri nets (NP-nets) are Petri nets with net tokens. The liveness and boundedness problems are undecidable for two-level NP-nets [14]. Boundedness is in EXPSPACE and liveness is in EXPSPACE or worse for plain Petri nets [6]. However, for some

A new formalism of Resource Driven Automata Nets (RDA-nets) is presented. A RDA-net has two levels: a system level is represented by a net of active resources, describing distribution of agents/resources and their interactions; agents in an object le

In this work we consider modeling of workflow systems with Petri nets. To increase flexibility and give tools for workflow models re-engineering we extend the formalism of workflow nets by considering systems of interacting nets. Then we study soundness – the main correctness property of workflow processes – and show, that for a special class of structured workflow system soundness can be proved in compositional way.

Nested Petri nets is a formalism for modeling hierarchical multi-agent systems. Tokens in nested Petri nets are elements represented by nets themselves. Decidability of some crucial for verification problems shows that, in spite of their ”unflat” structure, nested Petri nets maintain significant properties of ordinary Petri nets. A comparison with some other Petri net models is given. The formalism allows generalization to a recursive case, when a nested Petri net may generate its own copy as its element. Two simple examples illustrate the approach.