Business Process Services Portal Analyze and obtain insight into your business processes

The Business Process Services Portal makes business processes more actionable and reduces the entrance barrier for tool developers in adopting novel process-related technologies. Usually, the algorithmic solutions underlying a technology are published in a research publication and a prototype is implemented in some business process modeling tool.

Unfortunately, this approach makes it very hard for other researchers to reuse and extend existing technology. In order to do so, they often need to reimplement an algorithm based on the publication that omits relevant details. If the prototype is made available for download to other users, reengineering of the code is frequently time-consuming and not always an option of choice. Typically, the prototype is part of a larger tool and it is hard to refactor it for use in a different context, due to missing componentization. Frequently, the user interested in a technology also discovers that only a subset of models in a given process modeling language is covered and that other technical requirements remained unaddressed. Consequently, reusing a technology is very expensive and often ineffective. More than a few reuse attempts have failed at an early stage.

With the Business Process Services Portal, we present a software vision for Business Process Management (BPM) where tools are developed as an assembly of distributed services encapsulating existing BPM technologies and simplifying their reuse. Human users can explore the functionality of services through a graphical user interface, whereas tools can leverage the services following common principles of a service-oriented architecture.

Screen short of the Business Process Service Portal displaying a automatically layouted process

The current set of services includes for example the hierarchical decomposition, control flow analysis, layout, comparison, simulation, and summary of business processes. The provisioning as services makes it easy for third party tools to include and further compose the technologies based on their needs. In addition, a portal providing a web-based graphical user interface helps human users to explore and familiarize themselves with the services.

Publications

• Cedric Favre, Beat Gfeller, Thomas Gschwind, Hagen Völzer, Jana Koehler, Jochen M. Küster, Oleksandr Maistrenko, Alexandru Marinescu and Biplav Srivastava. A Business Process Services Portal. 8th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM), September 2010.
• Cédric Favre and Hagen Völzer: Symbolic Execution of Acyclic Workflow Graphs. 8th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM), September 2010.
• B. Srivastava, Summarizing Processes, IBM Research Report, RI100008, 2010.
• J. M. Küster, C. Gerth, A. Förster and G. Engels. Detecting and Resolving Process Model Differences in the Absence of a Change Log. In Proceedings 6th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM), September 2008.
• Remko Dijkman, Jochen M. Küster, Hagen Völzer. Identifying Refactoring Opportunities in Process Model Repositories, Internal Manuscript, 2010.
• Thomas Gschwind, Jana Koehler and Janette Wong. Applying Patterns during Business Process Modeling. In Marlon Dumas, Manfred Reichert, and Ming-Chien Shan, editors, 6th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM), September 2008.
• Jussi Vanhatalo, Hagen Völzer, Jana Koehler: The Refined Process Structure Tree. 6th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM), September 2008.

Project Information, Contact

You can visit the Business Process Services Portal and try the different services on your own! Or get in contact with Thomas Gschwind (thg at zurich.ibm.com).