DSV Blog

I have just returned from a six weeks visit at the BPM group at QUT, where I was invited by Dr Chun Ouyang.

During my stay I worked on:
1) A revision of our report on open source tools evaluation with the workflow patterns. The extended and updated version of the paper is available here;
2) A book chapter on open source workflow management systems.

At QUT, I attended the following presentations:
1) The Oracle Unified Method by David Burke (Oracle Corporation, USA);
2) YAWL and Second Life (a Youtube video of the product can be found here);
3) An Examination of Activity Labelling Practices in Process Modelling by Jan Recker’s.

A part of my work plan at QUT was to get familiar with the YAWL4film application. Chun was kind and gave me a detailed presentation and demonstration of the system.

During my visit at QUT, on demand by industry representatives, I also started the Workflow Patterns Google group, which is meant to provide a discussion forum for the workflow patterns. Your are welcome to join in.

Today I returned from a conference trip to the Business Process Management (BPM) conference, which was held 1-4 of September 2008 in Milan, Italy.

On the 1st of Sept. I gave a presentation on the workshop Business Process Management and Social Software, held in conjunction with the conference. I presented the paper “Business Process Management with Social Software Systems – a New Paradigm for Work Organisation” coauthored by Paul Johannesson and Birger Andersson and myself.

The slides from the presentation can be downloaded here
What_is_Social_Software-petia.ppt

Outstanding summaries for many of the presentations can be found on Sandy Kemsley’s blog. (Only presentations which went in parallel are missing there.) I am glad Sandy joined my presentation and the feedback I got on it through her blog post. Thanks Sandy!

Personally, I very much enjoyed the tutorial by Wil van der Aalst on Process Mining. During this tutorial, Wil gave an excellent overview of the existing approaches for mining process models from log files. He went trough:
– the Alpha algorithm;
– Multi phase miner;
– Genetic mining; and
– Region-based approaches (both state-based regions and language based regions).
Furthermore, Wil spoke about discovery in the data and the organisational perspectives. He concluded the tutorial with a demonstration of ProM, which is an open-source process mining toolkit supporting a variety of process mining techniques with more than 230 plugins.

Last week John Mettraux from Macnica, Yokohama, visited us at DSV. John is the man behind one of the leading open source workflow managemetn systems, called OpenWFE. OpenWFE was also one of the first open source projects in the area. The system was initially developed in Java and registered at SourceForge in 2002. In 2006 it was rewritten in Ruby and is since this distributed through RubyForge under the name OpenWFEru.

I came in contact with John when I was working on an evaluation of open source WFMSs. OpenWFE was among the analysed systems and John provided helpful feedback on our work.

At DSV, John gave a presentation on OpenWFEru (also called Ruote). The slides from the presentation are available here. The vidio from the presentation is available here.

A link to John’s personal blog, Processi, can be found here.

Thanks, John, for visiting us and for giving an excellent presentation!

Today I gave a presentation of the Informations Systems group at ICT school at KTH to two guests from Khalifa University in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates:
Dr. Ali Al-Qayedi and Mr. Salah Al Akbaru.

The slides from the presentation can be found here. They are based on material produced by Lars Asker, Magnus Boman, Mats Danielson, Paul Johannesson and myself. Lasse, Magnus, Mats and Paul, thank you for your contribution.

Last week Dr. Chun Ouyang from the BPM group at QUT visited us. She used the opportunity to stop over in Stockholm after her conference trip to the 6th IEEE European Conferecne on Web Services held 12-14 November in Dublin.

Chun is known for her work on mapping BPMN to BPEL and BPEL to Petri nets. Recently Chun has been involved in the implementation of YAWL4Film. YAWL4Film is an extension of YAWL for supporting the film production process in the film industry in Australia. At DSV Chun gave a very interesting and inspiring presentation of this work. More about it can be read here.
Chun’s visit is a continuation of our cooperation with the BPM group at QUT, which I regularly visit (latest in July-August 2008).

During Chun’s one week stay at DSV we worked on:
– Migration of YAWL4Film and the Conference case to the new release of YAWL, YAWL 2.0
– A new project proposal at QUT, which will be related to our project proposal on Service Oriented Architecture for Knowledge Intensive Processes– The book chapters for the YAWL book in which we are involved.

Thanks for your visit Chun!

Today, Paul, Birger, Martin and I submitted a project application to the Swedish Research Council.

Abstract:
Software support for well structured business processes is today provided through workflow technology
and process management tools. Tailored to support well structured processes, these tools do not provide
adequate support for loosely structured work activities such as knowledge intensive processes. This type of work
is heavily reliant on professional knowledge, deals with large amounts of data and tasks that can be redone several
times. The purpose of the project is to bring together state-of-the-art research in business process management
systems and social software to design services and methodology for supporting loosely structured processes. This
architecture will enable flexible process enactment, configurable and context-aware user interfaces, and service
based task support.

VR09-ProjectDescription.pdf
VR09-PopularDescription.pdf

Recently I returned from a two months long visit at the BPM group at QUT in Brisbane, Australia.

During the time at QUT:

• I worked on the YAWL-demo for the ÖST-project, implementing the emergency telephone application and installation process. I implemented a couple of customs forms for the demo and used code written by David Truffet in doing this, as well as David’s wonderful help. Thank you David!
• I started working in the area of large process models, where I am cooperating with Marcello La Rosa and Arthur ter Hofstede.
• I produced lecture slides for the YAWL book chapter on open source workflow systems (Chapter 16). Paul and Birger, who are co-authors of the chapter, helped me with the slides.

Many thanks to the BPM group and QUT for their hospitality.

During November 2009 David Truffet visited the Information Systems laboratory at DSV for four weeks. David completed his PhD at University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane some years ago and has worked since this with projects at the local government in Australia. I met him when visiting the BPM group at QUT last July. We were then working om similar problems: myself, on the emergency phone application process implementation in YAWL for the ÖST project and David was working on a process implementation for a local case study. David let me use his solutions and code and I invited him to DSV to help completing the prototype we are developing for the ÖST project.

During David’s visit we worked on
– improving the process implementation in YAWL
– implementing customized jsp forms for the process
– e-mail notifications for tasks and web-interface for task completion (so that the workflow management system used to manage the process remains invisible for the users)

In addition David also
– added multilingual functionality to the solution
– worked on accessibility issues so that the prototype complies with EU’s web accessibility policy.

The prototype is almost ready now and I am looking forward to release it soon.

Thanks for your visit David and for the four fruitful weeks spent here!

A new milestone in the ÖST project is reached. The prototyping of the emergency phone service in YAWL is now completed.

The work with the prototype was mainly carried out during October-November and David Truffet’s visit at DSV.

The prototype is developed in YAWL. It demonstrates how a workflow/business process management system can be used as a back-end system for implementing web-services. The film here shows the execution of a case in the system, i.e. how a citizen submits an application for emergency phone service to a municipality in Sweden and how the application is handled by the local government. The recording is in Swedish. A translation to English will be offered soon.

The prototype will be released for testing in the beginning of January 2010.

The process analysis for the e-service was carried out at Järfälla municipality during spring with help of Gustaf Juell-Skielse.

Thank you David for your work with the prototype. Thank you Gustaf for your cooperation since the beginning of the project.

Marry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

In February 2010 I visited the BPM group at QUT for three weeks. Together with Prof. Arthur ter Hofstede and Dr. Marcello la Rosa, I am working on collecting and systematizing patterns for dealing with process models complexity. It is a continuation of the work we initiated during my visit to QUT last summer. The planned outcome of this cooperation is a conference paper, which we hope to be able to complete at the end of this month.