Data streams from Internet of Things (IoT) devices containing sensors and actuators provide new insights into their interactions, context, and process executions in the physical world. These new data sources may open up novel opportunities to apply Business Process Management (BPM) technologies to analyze process and activity executions using established process mining techniques. However, the rather low abstraction level of data emitted from the IoT devices is often not suitable to directly apply process mining, which requires additional steps of event abstraction. Related approaches train expensive supervised machine learning models on historical sensor data to realize this event abstraction enabling only a post-mortem classification of activity executions. In this work we propose a framework to automatically generate activity detection services from IoT data with minimal human involvement to implement the event abstraction. Along with the framework, we present a software architecture focused on a flexible and extensible complex event processing (CEP) platform that achieves high-performance activity detection from IoT data streams at runtime–enabling online process analytics. Evaluations of our proof-of-concept implementation to monitor processes executed in smart manufacturing and smart healthcare show acceptable results when detecting activities that are affected by no to only small variations in the underlying IoT data. We identify several ways to improve the robustness of the activity detections regarding variations in IoT data as starting points for future work.

Cross-organizational business processes emerge from the cooperation of intra-organizational business processes exchanging messages. The cooperating processes establish temporal agreements in the form of constraints, representing timeliness obligations on the one hand and guarantees on the other hand. These constraints also form requirements for the design of the hidden implementation of the processes and are the basis of local control decisions. We present a comprehensive methodology for modeling the temporal aspects of cross-organizational business processes, checking the dynamic controllability of such processes, and supporting the reaching and the checking of temporal agreements. We do so by computing the consequences of temporal constraints and business secrecy requirements and by computing the weakest preconditions for the dynamic controllability of a participating process.

Web service compositions establish Temporal Service Level Agreements to have guarantees of temporal correctness. Temporal SLAs can be realized through the exchange of temporal parameters between service providers and clients. However, so far, it was not possible to compute a priori restrictions on the values for these parameters, such that the composition is dynamically controllable, i.e. free from time failures under any foreseeable circumstance. Here we provide a sound and complete method to compute restrictions for temporal parameters in a Web service composition with guarantees of dynamic controllability.

Processes have been successfully introduced for modeling dynamic phenomena in many areas like business, production, health care, etc. Many of these applications require to adequately deal with temporal aspects. Process models need to express temporal durations, temporal constraints like allowed time between events, and deadlines. For checking the correctness of process definitions with temporal constraints, different notions and algorithms have been developed. Schedules for the execution of processes can be computed and proactive time management supports process managers to avoid time failures during the execution of a process. We present an overview of the problems and the requirements for treating time in business processes and the solutions achieved by applying results and techniques of research in temporal representation and reasoning. We reflect where expectations have not yet been met and sketch challenges in temporal representation and reasoning for addressing advanced requirements of the management of business processes.

Cross-organizational business processes emerge from the cooperation of intra-organizational business processes through exchange of messages. The involved parties agree on communication protocols, which contain in particular temporal constraints: as obligations on one hand, and as guarantees on the other hand. These constraints form also requirements for the design of the hidden implementation of the processes and are the basis for control decisions for each party. We present a comprehensive methodology for modeling the temporal aspects of cross-organizational business processes, checking dynamic controllability of such processes, and supporting the negotiation of temporal commitments. We do so by computing the consequences of temporal constraints in choreographies, and by computing the weakest preconditions for the dynamic controllability of a participating process.

Temporal Service Level Agreements are an important quality criterion for the offering of composed web services. The formulation of temporal requirements of a service might involve parameters passed to the service. We propose a technique enabling service providers to check whether they can guarantee a temporal service level agreement (SLA) requested by a client. This techniques is based on analyzing the controllability of service compositions with temporal parameters taking into account range constraints on these parameters as specified in a temporal SLA.

Temporal Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a distinguishing characteristics for offered (composed) services: the weaker the restrictions, the broader the ranges of input parameters, the wider the applicability of an offered service. We propose a technique for the providers of composed services with temporal parameters to compute the broadest ranges for the temporal input parameters such that all service invocations where the parameters are within these ranges are dynamically controllable, i.e. that the adherence to temporal constraints can be guaranteed.

Inter-organizational business processes can be designed top-down: starting from a global process model, where each activity and gateway is assigned to one of the participating organizations, local processes (or views/stubs for refinement) are generated for each organization. The resulting inter-organizational process is executed by the local processes in a fully distributed manner. Implementing the data-flow in such a scenario is highly complex, both because of the combinatorial explosion of possible solutions and because of conflicting goals for implementing the data-flow. We present a flexible, heuristic algorithm for implementing the data-flow for inter-organizational processes according to various user preferences, which significantly improves over the base-line approaches proposed so far. The approach is fully implemented and a comprehensive, multi-dimensional evaluation is provided.

The composition of web services frequently requires the adequate representation of temporal requirements, temporal obligations, and temporal assumptions. Currently, the modeling of orchestrations and their service level agreements including temporal constraints suffers however from a mismatch between more procedural orchestration models and more declarative formulations of temporal constraints. We proposed the introduction of temporal conditions in the formulation of conditional constructs for process modeling to give process designers explicit control over the temporal behavior of the processes they model. By transforming the so modeled processes to processes with decision nodes we can take advantage of the recently developed CSTNUDs, temporal control networks with conditions, uncertainty and decisions, which in particular provide for checking the dynamic controllability of temporally constrained processes.

Inter-organizational business processes can be designed top-down following the public to private approach. First, a global process model is designed. In a second step, each activity is assigned to one of the business partners. Finally, processes (or views/stubs for refinement) are generated for each partner. The resulting inter-organizational process is executed in a fully distributed way by the set of communicating local processes. Existing approaches concentrate on the control-flow and ignore the data-flow or follow rather simple approaches for implementing the data-flow. However, automatically generating message-exchanges is a challenging task since numerous solutions with hugely varying advantages and disadvantages are possible. In this paper, we present criteria for assessing data-flow implementation and discuss baseline approaches that each optimize one of these criteria. All algorithms are implemented and evaluated for a variety of different process classes.