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.

Simulation is a common approach to predict the effect of business process changes on quantitative performance. The starting point of Business Process Simulation (BPS) is a process model enriched with simulation parameters. To cope with the typically large parameter spaces of BPS models, several methods have been proposed to automatically discover BPS models from event logs. Virtually all these approaches neglect the data perspective of business processes. Yet, the data attributes manipulated by a business process often determine which activities are performed, how many times, and when. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a data-aware BPS modeling approach and a method to discover data-aware BPS models from event logs. The BPS modeling approach supports three types of data attributes (global, case-level, and event-level) as well as deterministic and stochastic attribute update rules and data-aware branching conditions. An empirical evaluation shows that the proposed method accurately discovers the type of each data attribute and its associated update rules, and that the resulting BPS models more closely replicate the process execution control flow relative to data-unaware BPS models.

Business process simulation is a versatile technique to predict the impact of one or more changes on the performance of a process. Process simulation is often used to identify sets of changes that optimize one or more performance measures. Mainstream approaches to process simulation suffer from various limitations, some stemming from the fact that they treat resources as undifferentiated entities grouped into resource pools, and then assuming that all resources in a pool have the same performance and share the same availability calendars. Previous studies have acknowledged these assumptions, without quantifying their impact on simulation model accuracy. This article addresses this gap in the context of simulation models automatically discovered from event logs. Specifically, the contribution of the article is three-fold. First, the article proposes a simulation approach, wherein each resource is treated as an individual entity, with its own performance and availability calendar. Second, it proposes a method for discovering simulation models with differentiated performance and availability, starting from an event log of a business process. Third, it proposes a method to optimize the resource availability calendars in order to minimize resource cost while also minimizing cycle times. An empirical evaluation shows that simulation models with differentiated resources more closely replicate the distributions of cycle times and the work rhythm in a process than models with undifferentiated resources, and that iteratively optimizing resource allocations in conjunction with resource calendars leads to superior cost-time tradeoffs with respect to optimizing these allocations and calendars separately.

In the field of business process simulation, the availability of resources is captured by assigning a calendar to each resource, e.g., Monday-Friday 9:00-18:00. Resources are assumed to be always available to perform activities during their calendar. This assumption often does not hold due to interruptions, breaks, or because resources time-share across multiple processes. A simulation model that captures availability via crisp time slots (a resource is either on or off during a slot) does not capture these behaviors, leading to inaccuracies in the simulation output. This paper presents a simulation approach wherein resource availability is modeled probabilistically. In this approach, each availability time slot is associated with a probability, allowing us to capture, for example, that a resource is available on Fridays between 14:00-15:00 with 90% probability and between 17:00-18:00 with 50% probability. The paper proposes an algorithm to discover probabilistic availability calendars from event logs. An empirical evaluation shows that simulation models with probabilistic calendars discovered from event logs, replicate the temporal distribution of activity instances and cycle times of a process more closely than simulation models with crisp calendars.