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.

Test-driven declarative process modelling combines process models with test traces and has been introduced as a means to achieve both the flexibility provided by the declarative approach and the comprehensibility of the imperative approach. Open test-driven modelling adds a notion of context to tests, specifying the activities of concern in the model, and has been introduced as a means to support both iterative test-driven modelling, where the model can be extended without having to change all tests, and unit testing, where tests can define desired properties of parts of the process without needing to reason about the details of the whole process. The openness however makes checking a test more demanding, since actions outside the context are allowed at any point in the test execution and therefore many different traces may validate or invalidate an open test. In this paper we combine previously developed static techniques for effective open test-driven modelling for Dynamic Condition Response Graphs with a novel efficient implementation of dynamic checking of open tests based on alignment checking. We illustrate the static techniques on an example based on a real-life cross-organizational case management system and benchmark the dynamic checking on models and tests of varying size.

Object-centric process mining views processes and traces as an interaction between many objects, each with their own life cycle, as opposed to being centred around the concept of a single case. Instead of describing implicit process flows, declarative process modelling focuses on the description of processes as a set of explicit rules or constraints. The declarative Dynamic Condition Response (DCR) Graphs notation has seen wide industry adoption, in particular in the Danish public sector, has seen significant work on the development of methods for the modelling, verification, and enactment of collaborative processes, and has led to the development of the award winning DisCoveR process miner. In this paper we apply object-centric concepts to DCR Graphs modelling and mining, in particular we: (1) show an extension to DCR Graphs that allows capturing of object-centric process relations and (2) introduce a process discovery method for such object-centric DCR Graphs. We showcase these contributions on the BPIC2017 loan application log.