We propose a set of techniques to analyze final or intermediate process outcomes. The main novelties are (i) outcome flow diagrams - a visualization of a process as a sequence of global decisions and their contribution to the process outcomes, and (ii) an interactive method to find explanations for process outcomes. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our techniques in the context of an in-depth study on the Road Traffic Fine Management event log, for which we obtain so far undocumented insights.

One important use case for (business) process technology is process compliance. We propose that managing security objects such as cryptographic keys is an application domain that can greatly benefit from using process technology because of a critical compliance requirement. To this end, we present a BPMN extension and a design of a support system for key management processes. Both were driven by a case study on a distributed application using a standard hierarchical public key infrastructure, which we also present. Our prototypical implementation of the support system shows that process compliance for security object management processes can be substantially supported with moderate effort by extending the standard process technology.

Workflow graphs (WFGs) are control-flow graphs extended by parallel fork and join. They are used to represent the main control-flow of e.g. business process models modeled in languages such as BPMN or UML activity diagrams. A WFG is said to be sound if it is free of deadlocks and exhibits no lack of synchronization. We study the question whether the executions of a time-annotated sound WFG meet a given deadline. We present polynomial-time algorithms and NP-hardness results for different cases. In particular, we show that it can be decided in polynomial time whether some executions of a sound WFG meet the deadline. Furthermore we show that for general probabilistic WFGs, it is NP-hard to determine whether the probability of an execution meeting the deadline is higher than a given threshold, whereas the expected duration of an execution can be computed in polynomial time.

We present a novel technique that optimizes the dispatching of incident tickets to the agents in an IT Service Support Environment. Unlike the common skill-based dispatching, our approach also takes empirical evidence on the agent's speed from historical data into account. Our solution consists of two parts. First, a novel technique clusters historic tickets into incident categories that are discriminative in terms of agent's performance. Second, a dispatching policy selects, for an incoming ticket, the fastest available agent according to the target cluster. We show that, for ticket data collected from several Service Delivery Units, our new dispatching technique can reduce service time between $35\%$ and $44\%$.

We define when a linear-time temporal property is a fairness property with respect to a given system. This captures the essence shared by most fairness assumptions that are used in the specification and verification of reactive and concurrent systems, such as weak fairness, strong fairness, k -fairness, and many others. We provide three characterizations of fairness: a language-theoretic, a game-theoretic, and a topological characterization. It turns out that the fairness properties are the sets that are “large” from a topological point of view, that is, they are the co-meager sets in the natural topology of runs of a given system. This insight provides a link to probability theory where a set is “large” when it has measure 1. While these two notions of largeness are similar, they do not coincide in general. However, we show that they coincide for ω -regular properties and bounded Borel measures. That is, an ω -regular temporal property of a finite-state system has measure 1 under a bounded Borel measure if and only if it is a fairness property with respect to that system. The definition of fairness leads to a generic relaxation of correctness of a system in linear-time semantics. We define a system to be fairly correct if there exists a fairness assumption under which it satisfies its specification. Equivalently, a system is fairly correct if the set of runs satisfying the specification is topologically large. We motivate this notion of correctness and show how it can be verified in a system.

We motivate and study a generic relaxation of correctness of reactive and concurrent systems with respect to a temporal specification. We define a system to be fairly correct if there exists a fairness assumption under which it satisfies its specification. Equivalently, a system is fairly correct if the set of runs satisfying the specification is large from a topological point of view, i.e., it is a co-meager set. We compare topological largeness with its more popular sibling, probabilistic largeness, where a specification is probabilistically large if the set of runs satisfying the specification has probability 1. We show that topological and probabilistic largeness of omega-regular specifications coincide for bounded Borel measures on finite-state systems. As a corollary, we show that, for specifications expressed in LTL or by Buchi automata, checking that a finite-state system is fairly correct has the same complexity as checking that it is correct. Finally we study variants of the logics CTL and CTL*, where the 'for all runs' quantifier is replaced by a 'for a large set of runs' quantifier. We show that the model checking complexity for these variants is the same as for the original logics

Software configuration management is the discipline of managing large collections of software development artefacts from which software products are built. Software configuration management tools typically deal with artefacts at fine levels of granularity - such as individual source code files - and assist with coordination of changes to such artefacts. This paper describes a lightweight tool, designed to be used on top of a traditional file-based configuration management system. The add-on tool support enables users to flexibly define new hierarchical views of product structure, independent of the underlying artefact-repository structure. The tool extracts configuration and change data with respect to the user-defined hierarchy, leading to improved visibility of how individual subsystems have changed. The approach yields a range of new capabilities for build managers, and verification and validation teams. The paper includes a description of our experience using the tool in an organization that builds large embedded software systems.

This paper describes a tool that manages a hierarchical, "is a subsystem of"-structure on a set of software development artefacts and that provides configuration management (CM) for subsystems by interacting with an existing CM tool. The tool is based on a recently proposed framework for subsystem-based configuration management. The tool demonstrates the feasibility of the framework and develops it further The design of the framework and the tool was developed in collaboration with Invensys SCADA Development and it is discussed in relation to their current software development process.

Abstract A technique to model and to verify distributed algorithms is suggested. This technique (based on Petri nets) reduces the modelling and analysis effort to a reasonable level. The paper outlines the technique using the example of a typical network algorithm, the echo algorithm .