Chun Ouyang - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Chun Ouyang

arXiv (Cornell University), Nov 24, 2020

IEEE Access

Despite their rapid growth, the utilisation of application programming interfaces (APIs) poses ch... more Despite their rapid growth, the utilisation of application programming interfaces (APIs) poses challenges for companies under pressure to yield productive systems integration. APIs of larger systems tend to be large, complex and have reduced modularity and quality, which makes them cumbersome to comprehend and use. These challenges can be addressed by static API analysis that focuses on studying API code itself and deriving business entities and dependencies from operational signatures. However, existing techniques for static analysis of APIs face the challenges in deriving a sufficient coverage of business entity relationship types from implementation-oriented API operational signatures carrying limited semantic insights. The paper aims to address such problems by supporting static analysis techniques for APIs that improve their modularity. Our approach adopts an object-oriented paradigm where the concept of ''object'' is exemplified by the notion of business entity. It systematically applies interface analysis methods and techniques for eliciting knowledge of business entities and their attributes, for deriving the temporal order of calling operations across multiple business entities, and for learning and extracting various ways of invoking a service via APIs. The approach is implemented as an open-source tool and applied to a group of widely-deployed services in practice for validation. The research contributes to identifying key aspects of both the structure and behaviour of APIs, which will lead to building a simplified but comprehensive interface (presentation) layer to assist service users in understanding complex and overloaded interfaces as well as to facilitate efficient and effective service integration.

Decision Support Systems, 2022

Providing appropriate structures around human resources can streamline operations and thus facili... more Providing appropriate structures around human resources can streamline operations and thus facilitate the competitiveness of an organization. To achieve this goal, modern organizations need to acquire an accurate and timely understanding of human resource grouping while faced with an ever-changing environment. The use of process mining offers a promising way to help address the need through utilizing event log data stored in information systems. By extracting knowledge about the actual behavior of resources participating in business processes from event logs, organizational models can be constructed, which facilitate the analysis of the de facto grouping of human resources relevant to process execution. Nevertheless, open research gaps remain to be addressed when applying the state-of-the-art process mining to analyze resource grouping. For one, the discovery of organizational models has only limited connections with the context of process execution. For another, a rigorous solution that evaluates organizational models against event log data is yet to be proposed. In this paper, we aim to tackle these research challenges by developing a novel framework built upon a richer definition of organizational models coupling resource grouping with process execution knowledge. By introducing notions of conformance checking for organizational models, the framework allows effective evaluation of organizational models, and therefore provides a foundation for analyzing and improving resource grouping based on event logs. We demonstrate the feasibility of this framework by proposing an approach underpinned by the framework for organizational model discovery, and also conduct experiments on real-life event logs to discover and evaluate organizational models.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2018

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) provide automated support for the execution of busines... more Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) provide automated support for the execution of business processes in modern organisations. With the advent of cloud computing, the deployment of BPMS is shifting from traditional on-premise models to the Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS) paradigm with the aim of delivering Business Process Automation as a Service on the cloud. To cope with the impact of numerous simultaneous requests from multiple tenants, a typical SaaS approach will launch multiple instances of its core applications and distribute workload to these application instances via load balancing strategies that operate under the assumption that tenant requests are stateless. However, since business process executions are stateful and often longrunning, strategies that assume statelessness are inadequate for ensuring a uniform distribution of system load. In this paper, we propose several new load balancing strategies that support the deployment of BPMS in the cloud by taking into account (a) the workload imposed by the execution of stateful process instances from multiple tenants and (b) the capacity and availability of BPMS workflow engines at runtime. We have developed a prototypical implementation built upon an open-source BPMS and used it to evaluate the performance of the proposed load balancing strategies within the context of diverse load scenarios with models of varying complexity.

Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference, 2019

Generating log requirements for checking conformance against healthcare standards using workflow ... more Generating log requirements for checking conformance against healthcare standards using workflow modelling. In Wang, Y (Ed.

Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly, 2018

Separation of cross-cutting concerns is an important issue in business process management, where ... more Separation of cross-cutting concerns is an important issue in business process management, where Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modeling (AO-BPM) aims to support this separation through a new form of encapsulation technique. Although different researchers have investigated how these models can be designed to support separation of non-retroactive cross-cutting concerns, there is no study that defines the separation of retroactive ones. The lack of a unified definition of the syntax and the operational semantics for these models also hinders their enactment in practice. As a result, the perceived usefulness and usability of these approaches have not yet been investigated so far. Thus, this article fills this gap by formalizing an AO-BPM language and the semantics that can support enactment of such models. The semantics are validated through the state-space analysis technique, and the feasibility of the implementation is also demonstrated. The perceived usefulness and ease of use of the AO-BPM is evaluated by applying the Technology Acceptance Model during a workshop session. The result shows that participants perceived the approach usable and, in fact, easy to use.

Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2014

The management of risk in business processes has been the subject of active research in the past ... more The management of risk in business processes has been the subject of active research in the past few years. Potentially, many benefits can be obtained by integrating the two traditionally separated fields of risk management and business process management, including the ability to minimize risks in business processes by design and to mitigate such risks at run time. While there has been an increasing amount of research aimed at delivering such an integrated system, these research efforts vary in terms of scope, goals, and functionality. Through the systematic collection and evaluation of relevant literature, this article compares and classifies current approaches in the area of risk-aware business process management in order to expose and explain current research gaps. The process through which relevant literature was collected, filtered, and evaluated is also detailed. Finally, a research agenda is proposed.

Decision Support Systems, 2017

The volume of process-related data is growing rapidly: more and more business operations are bein... more The volume of process-related data is growing rapidly: more and more business operations are being supported and monitored by information systems. Industry 4.0 and the corresponding industrial Internet of Things are about to generate new waves of process-related data, next to the abundance of event data already present in enterprise systems. However, organizations often fail to convert such data into strategic and tactical intelligence. This is due to the lack of dedicated technologies that are tailored to effectively manage the information on processes encoded in process models and process execution records. Process-related information is a core organizational asset which requires dedicated analytics to unlock its full potential. This paper proposes a framework for devising process querying methods, i.e., techniques for the (automated) management of repositories of designed and executed processes, as well as models that describe relationships between processes. The framework is composed of generic components that can be configured to create a range of process querying methods. The motivation for the framework stems from use cases in the field of Business Process Management. The design of the framework is informed by and validated via a systematic literature review. The framework structures the state of the art and points to gaps in existing research. Process querying methods need to address these gaps to better support strategic decision-making and provide the next generation of Business Intelligence platforms.

Formal Aspects of Computing, 2015

Substantial research efforts have been expended to deal with the complexity of concurrent systems... more Substantial research efforts have been expended to deal with the complexity of concurrent systems that is inherent to their analysis, e.g., works that tackle the well-known state space explosion problem. Approaches differ in the classes of properties that they are able to suitably check and this is largely a result of the way they balance the trade-off between analysis time and space employed to describe a concurrent system. One interesting class of properties is concerned with behavioral characteristics. These properties are conveniently expressed in terms of computations, or runs , in concurrent systems. This article introduces the theory of untanglings that exploits a particular representation of a collection of runs in a concurrent system. It is shown that a representative untangling of a bounded concurrent system can be constructed that captures all and only the behavior of the system. Representative untanglings strike a unique balance between time and space, yet provide a sing...

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

Standardisation of languages in the field of business process management has long been an elusive... more Standardisation of languages in the field of business process management has long been an elusive goal. Recently though, consensus has built around one process implementation language, namely BPEL, and two fundamentally similar process modelling notations, namely UML Activity Diagram (UML AD) and BPMN. This paper presents a technique for generating BPEL code from process models expressed in a core subset of BPMN and UML AD. This model-to-code translation is a necessary ingredient to the emergence of model-driven business process development environments based on these standards. The proposed translation has been implemented as an open source tool.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

Aspect orientation is an important approach to address complexity of cross-cutting concerns in In... more Aspect orientation is an important approach to address complexity of cross-cutting concerns in Information Systems. This approach encapsulates these concerns separately and compose them to the main module when needed. Although there are different works which shows how this separation should be performed in process models, the composition of them is an open area. In this paper, we demonstrate the semantics of a service which enables this composition. The result can also be used as a blueprint to implement the service to support aspect orientation in Business Process Management area.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

The ability to steer business operations in alignment with the true origins of costs, and to be i... more The ability to steer business operations in alignment with the true origins of costs, and to be informed about this on a real-time basis, allows businesses to increase profitability. In most organisations however, high-level cost-based managerial decisions are still being made separately from process-related operational decisions. In this paper, we describe how process-related decisions at the operational level can be guided by cost considerations and how these cost-informed decision rules can be supported by a workflow management system. The paper presents the conceptual framework together with data requirements and technical challenges that need to be addressed to realise cost-informed workflow execution. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated using a prototype implementation in the YAWL workflow environment.

The rapid growth of services available on the Internet and exploited through ever globalizing bus... more The rapid growth of services available on the Internet and exploited through ever globalizing business networks poses new challenges for service interoperability. New services, from consumer "apps", enterprise suites, platform and infrastructure resources, are vying for demand with quickly evolving and overlapping capabilities, and shorter cycles of extending service access from user interfaces to software interfaces. Services, drawn from a wider global setting, are subject to greater change and heterogeneity, demanding new requirements for structural and behavioral interface adaptation. In this paper, we analyze service interoperability scenarios in global business networks, and propose new patterns for service interactions, above those proposed over the last 10 years through the development of Web service standards and process choreography languages. By contrast, we reduce assumptions of design-time knowledge required to adapt services, giving way to run-time mismatch resolutions, extend the focus from bilateral to multilateral messaging interactions, and propose declarative ways in which services and interactions take part in long-running conversations via the explicit use of state.

The Yet Another Workflow Language (YAWL) language and environment has been used to prototype, ver... more The Yet Another Workflow Language (YAWL) language and environment has been used to prototype, verify, execute and analyse business processes in a wide variety of industrial domains, such as telephony, construction, supply chain, insurance services, medical environments, personnel management and the creative arts. These engagements offer the YAWL researcher community a great opportunity to validate our research findings within an industry setting, as well as discovery of possible enhancements from the end user perspective. This paper describes three such industry projects, discusses why YAWL was chosen and how it was used in each, and reflects on the insights gained along the way.

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2013

As business process management technology matures, organisations acquire more and more business p... more As business process management technology matures, organisations acquire more and more business process models. The management of the resulting collections of process models poses real challenges. One of these challenges concerns model retrieval where support should be provided for the formulation and efficient execution of business process model queries. As queries based on only structural information cannot deal with all querying requirements in practice, there should be support for queries that require knowledge of process model semantics. In this paper we formally define a process model query language that is based on semantic relationships between tasks in process models and is independent of any particular process modelling notation.

ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, 2015

Business process analysis and process mining, particularly within the health care domain, remain ... more Business process analysis and process mining, particularly within the health care domain, remain under-utilized. Applied research that employs such techniques to routinely collected health care data enables stakeholders to empirically investigate care as it is delivered by different health providers. However, cross-organizational mining and the comparative analysis of processes present a set of unique challenges in terms of ensuring population and activity comparability, visualizing the mined models, and interpreting the results. Without addressing these issues, health providers will find it difficult to use process mining insights, and the potential benefits of evidence-based process improvement within health will remain unrealized. In this article, we present a brief introduction on the nature of health care processes, a review of process mining in health literature, and a case study conducted to explore and learn how health care data and cross-organizational comparisons with proc...

Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 2013

Having a reliable understanding about the behaviours, problems, and performance of existing proce... more Having a reliable understanding about the behaviours, problems, and performance of existing processes is important in enabling a targeted process improvement initiative. Recently, there has been an increase in the application of innovative process mining techniques to facilitate evidence-based understanding about organizations' business processes. Nevertheless, the application of these techniques in the domain of finance in Australia is, at best, scarce. This paper details a 6-month case study on the application of process mining in one of the largest insurance companies in Australia. In particular, the challenges encountered, the lessons learned, and the results obtained from this case study are detailed. Through this case study, we not only validated existing 'lessons learned' from other similar case studies, but also added new insights that can be beneficial to other practitioners in applying process mining in their respective fields.

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2013

Notice: Changes introduced as a result of publishing processes such as copy-editing and formattin... more Notice: Changes introduced as a result of publishing processes such as copy-editing and formatting may not be reflected in this document.

Science of Computer Programming, 2007

Web service composition refers to the creation of new (Web) services by combining functionality p... more Web service composition refers to the creation of new (Web) services by combining functionality provided by existing ones. A number of domain-specific languages for service composition have been proposed with consensus being formed around a process-oriented language known as WS-BPEL (or BPEL). The kernel of BPEL consists of simple communication primitives that may be combined using control-flow constructs expressing sequence, branching, parallelism, synchronization, etc. We present a comprehensive and rigorously defined mapping of BPEL constructs onto Petri net structures and use this for the analysis of various dynamic properties related to unreachable activities, conflicting messages, garbage collection, conformance checking, and deadlocks and lifelocks in interaction processes. We use a mapping onto Petri nets because this allows us to use existing theoretical results and analysis tools. Unlike approaches based on finite state machines, we do not need to construct the state space and can use structural analysis (e.g., transition invariants) instead. We have implemented a tool that translates BPEL processes into Petri nets and then applies Petri-net-based analysis techniques. This tool has been tested on different examples and has been used to answer a variety of questions.

arXiv (Cornell University), Nov 24, 2020

IEEE Access

Despite their rapid growth, the utilisation of application programming interfaces (APIs) poses ch... more Despite their rapid growth, the utilisation of application programming interfaces (APIs) poses challenges for companies under pressure to yield productive systems integration. APIs of larger systems tend to be large, complex and have reduced modularity and quality, which makes them cumbersome to comprehend and use. These challenges can be addressed by static API analysis that focuses on studying API code itself and deriving business entities and dependencies from operational signatures. However, existing techniques for static analysis of APIs face the challenges in deriving a sufficient coverage of business entity relationship types from implementation-oriented API operational signatures carrying limited semantic insights. The paper aims to address such problems by supporting static analysis techniques for APIs that improve their modularity. Our approach adopts an object-oriented paradigm where the concept of ''object'' is exemplified by the notion of business entity. It systematically applies interface analysis methods and techniques for eliciting knowledge of business entities and their attributes, for deriving the temporal order of calling operations across multiple business entities, and for learning and extracting various ways of invoking a service via APIs. The approach is implemented as an open-source tool and applied to a group of widely-deployed services in practice for validation. The research contributes to identifying key aspects of both the structure and behaviour of APIs, which will lead to building a simplified but comprehensive interface (presentation) layer to assist service users in understanding complex and overloaded interfaces as well as to facilitate efficient and effective service integration.

Decision Support Systems, 2022

Providing appropriate structures around human resources can streamline operations and thus facili... more Providing appropriate structures around human resources can streamline operations and thus facilitate the competitiveness of an organization. To achieve this goal, modern organizations need to acquire an accurate and timely understanding of human resource grouping while faced with an ever-changing environment. The use of process mining offers a promising way to help address the need through utilizing event log data stored in information systems. By extracting knowledge about the actual behavior of resources participating in business processes from event logs, organizational models can be constructed, which facilitate the analysis of the de facto grouping of human resources relevant to process execution. Nevertheless, open research gaps remain to be addressed when applying the state-of-the-art process mining to analyze resource grouping. For one, the discovery of organizational models has only limited connections with the context of process execution. For another, a rigorous solution that evaluates organizational models against event log data is yet to be proposed. In this paper, we aim to tackle these research challenges by developing a novel framework built upon a richer definition of organizational models coupling resource grouping with process execution knowledge. By introducing notions of conformance checking for organizational models, the framework allows effective evaluation of organizational models, and therefore provides a foundation for analyzing and improving resource grouping based on event logs. We demonstrate the feasibility of this framework by proposing an approach underpinned by the framework for organizational model discovery, and also conduct experiments on real-life event logs to discover and evaluate organizational models.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2018

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) provide automated support for the execution of busines... more Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) provide automated support for the execution of business processes in modern organisations. With the advent of cloud computing, the deployment of BPMS is shifting from traditional on-premise models to the Softwareas-a-Service (SaaS) paradigm with the aim of delivering Business Process Automation as a Service on the cloud. To cope with the impact of numerous simultaneous requests from multiple tenants, a typical SaaS approach will launch multiple instances of its core applications and distribute workload to these application instances via load balancing strategies that operate under the assumption that tenant requests are stateless. However, since business process executions are stateful and often longrunning, strategies that assume statelessness are inadequate for ensuring a uniform distribution of system load. In this paper, we propose several new load balancing strategies that support the deployment of BPMS in the cloud by taking into account (a) the workload imposed by the execution of stateful process instances from multiple tenants and (b) the capacity and availability of BPMS workflow engines at runtime. We have developed a prototypical implementation built upon an open-source BPMS and used it to evaluate the performance of the proposed load balancing strategies within the context of diverse load scenarios with models of varying complexity.

Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference, 2019

Generating log requirements for checking conformance against healthcare standards using workflow ... more Generating log requirements for checking conformance against healthcare standards using workflow modelling. In Wang, Y (Ed.

Complex Systems Informatics and Modeling Quarterly, 2018

Separation of cross-cutting concerns is an important issue in business process management, where ... more Separation of cross-cutting concerns is an important issue in business process management, where Aspect-Oriented Business Process Modeling (AO-BPM) aims to support this separation through a new form of encapsulation technique. Although different researchers have investigated how these models can be designed to support separation of non-retroactive cross-cutting concerns, there is no study that defines the separation of retroactive ones. The lack of a unified definition of the syntax and the operational semantics for these models also hinders their enactment in practice. As a result, the perceived usefulness and usability of these approaches have not yet been investigated so far. Thus, this article fills this gap by formalizing an AO-BPM language and the semantics that can support enactment of such models. The semantics are validated through the state-space analysis technique, and the feasibility of the implementation is also demonstrated. The perceived usefulness and ease of use of the AO-BPM is evaluated by applying the Technology Acceptance Model during a workshop session. The result shows that participants perceived the approach usable and, in fact, easy to use.

Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 2014

The management of risk in business processes has been the subject of active research in the past ... more The management of risk in business processes has been the subject of active research in the past few years. Potentially, many benefits can be obtained by integrating the two traditionally separated fields of risk management and business process management, including the ability to minimize risks in business processes by design and to mitigate such risks at run time. While there has been an increasing amount of research aimed at delivering such an integrated system, these research efforts vary in terms of scope, goals, and functionality. Through the systematic collection and evaluation of relevant literature, this article compares and classifies current approaches in the area of risk-aware business process management in order to expose and explain current research gaps. The process through which relevant literature was collected, filtered, and evaluated is also detailed. Finally, a research agenda is proposed.

Decision Support Systems, 2017

The volume of process-related data is growing rapidly: more and more business operations are bein... more The volume of process-related data is growing rapidly: more and more business operations are being supported and monitored by information systems. Industry 4.0 and the corresponding industrial Internet of Things are about to generate new waves of process-related data, next to the abundance of event data already present in enterprise systems. However, organizations often fail to convert such data into strategic and tactical intelligence. This is due to the lack of dedicated technologies that are tailored to effectively manage the information on processes encoded in process models and process execution records. Process-related information is a core organizational asset which requires dedicated analytics to unlock its full potential. This paper proposes a framework for devising process querying methods, i.e., techniques for the (automated) management of repositories of designed and executed processes, as well as models that describe relationships between processes. The framework is composed of generic components that can be configured to create a range of process querying methods. The motivation for the framework stems from use cases in the field of Business Process Management. The design of the framework is informed by and validated via a systematic literature review. The framework structures the state of the art and points to gaps in existing research. Process querying methods need to address these gaps to better support strategic decision-making and provide the next generation of Business Intelligence platforms.

Formal Aspects of Computing, 2015

Substantial research efforts have been expended to deal with the complexity of concurrent systems... more Substantial research efforts have been expended to deal with the complexity of concurrent systems that is inherent to their analysis, e.g., works that tackle the well-known state space explosion problem. Approaches differ in the classes of properties that they are able to suitably check and this is largely a result of the way they balance the trade-off between analysis time and space employed to describe a concurrent system. One interesting class of properties is concerned with behavioral characteristics. These properties are conveniently expressed in terms of computations, or runs , in concurrent systems. This article introduces the theory of untanglings that exploits a particular representation of a collection of runs in a concurrent system. It is shown that a representative untangling of a bounded concurrent system can be constructed that captures all and only the behavior of the system. Representative untanglings strike a unique balance between time and space, yet provide a sing...

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2006

Standardisation of languages in the field of business process management has long been an elusive... more Standardisation of languages in the field of business process management has long been an elusive goal. Recently though, consensus has built around one process implementation language, namely BPEL, and two fundamentally similar process modelling notations, namely UML Activity Diagram (UML AD) and BPMN. This paper presents a technique for generating BPEL code from process models expressed in a core subset of BPMN and UML AD. This model-to-code translation is a necessary ingredient to the emergence of model-driven business process development environments based on these standards. The proposed translation has been implemented as an open source tool.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

Aspect orientation is an important approach to address complexity of cross-cutting concerns in In... more Aspect orientation is an important approach to address complexity of cross-cutting concerns in Information Systems. This approach encapsulates these concerns separately and compose them to the main module when needed. Although there are different works which shows how this separation should be performed in process models, the composition of them is an open area. In this paper, we demonstrate the semantics of a service which enables this composition. The result can also be used as a blueprint to implement the service to support aspect orientation in Business Process Management area.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2013

The ability to steer business operations in alignment with the true origins of costs, and to be i... more The ability to steer business operations in alignment with the true origins of costs, and to be informed about this on a real-time basis, allows businesses to increase profitability. In most organisations however, high-level cost-based managerial decisions are still being made separately from process-related operational decisions. In this paper, we describe how process-related decisions at the operational level can be guided by cost considerations and how these cost-informed decision rules can be supported by a workflow management system. The paper presents the conceptual framework together with data requirements and technical challenges that need to be addressed to realise cost-informed workflow execution. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated using a prototype implementation in the YAWL workflow environment.

The rapid growth of services available on the Internet and exploited through ever globalizing bus... more The rapid growth of services available on the Internet and exploited through ever globalizing business networks poses new challenges for service interoperability. New services, from consumer "apps", enterprise suites, platform and infrastructure resources, are vying for demand with quickly evolving and overlapping capabilities, and shorter cycles of extending service access from user interfaces to software interfaces. Services, drawn from a wider global setting, are subject to greater change and heterogeneity, demanding new requirements for structural and behavioral interface adaptation. In this paper, we analyze service interoperability scenarios in global business networks, and propose new patterns for service interactions, above those proposed over the last 10 years through the development of Web service standards and process choreography languages. By contrast, we reduce assumptions of design-time knowledge required to adapt services, giving way to run-time mismatch resolutions, extend the focus from bilateral to multilateral messaging interactions, and propose declarative ways in which services and interactions take part in long-running conversations via the explicit use of state.

The Yet Another Workflow Language (YAWL) language and environment has been used to prototype, ver... more The Yet Another Workflow Language (YAWL) language and environment has been used to prototype, verify, execute and analyse business processes in a wide variety of industrial domains, such as telephony, construction, supply chain, insurance services, medical environments, personnel management and the creative arts. These engagements offer the YAWL researcher community a great opportunity to validate our research findings within an industry setting, as well as discovery of possible enhancements from the end user perspective. This paper describes three such industry projects, discusses why YAWL was chosen and how it was used in each, and reflects on the insights gained along the way.

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2013

As business process management technology matures, organisations acquire more and more business p... more As business process management technology matures, organisations acquire more and more business process models. The management of the resulting collections of process models poses real challenges. One of these challenges concerns model retrieval where support should be provided for the formulation and efficient execution of business process model queries. As queries based on only structural information cannot deal with all querying requirements in practice, there should be support for queries that require knowledge of process model semantics. In this paper we formally define a process model query language that is based on semantic relationships between tasks in process models and is independent of any particular process modelling notation.

ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems, 2015

Business process analysis and process mining, particularly within the health care domain, remain ... more Business process analysis and process mining, particularly within the health care domain, remain under-utilized. Applied research that employs such techniques to routinely collected health care data enables stakeholders to empirically investigate care as it is delivered by different health providers. However, cross-organizational mining and the comparative analysis of processes present a set of unique challenges in terms of ensuring population and activity comparability, visualizing the mined models, and interpreting the results. Without addressing these issues, health providers will find it difficult to use process mining insights, and the potential benefits of evidence-based process improvement within health will remain unrealized. In this article, we present a brief introduction on the nature of health care processes, a review of process mining in health literature, and a case study conducted to explore and learn how health care data and cross-organizational comparisons with proc...

Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 2013

Having a reliable understanding about the behaviours, problems, and performance of existing proce... more Having a reliable understanding about the behaviours, problems, and performance of existing processes is important in enabling a targeted process improvement initiative. Recently, there has been an increase in the application of innovative process mining techniques to facilitate evidence-based understanding about organizations' business processes. Nevertheless, the application of these techniques in the domain of finance in Australia is, at best, scarce. This paper details a 6-month case study on the application of process mining in one of the largest insurance companies in Australia. In particular, the challenges encountered, the lessons learned, and the results obtained from this case study are detailed. Through this case study, we not only validated existing 'lessons learned' from other similar case studies, but also added new insights that can be beneficial to other practitioners in applying process mining in their respective fields.

Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 2013

Notice: Changes introduced as a result of publishing processes such as copy-editing and formattin... more Notice: Changes introduced as a result of publishing processes such as copy-editing and formatting may not be reflected in this document.

Science of Computer Programming, 2007

Web service composition refers to the creation of new (Web) services by combining functionality p... more Web service composition refers to the creation of new (Web) services by combining functionality provided by existing ones. A number of domain-specific languages for service composition have been proposed with consensus being formed around a process-oriented language known as WS-BPEL (or BPEL). The kernel of BPEL consists of simple communication primitives that may be combined using control-flow constructs expressing sequence, branching, parallelism, synchronization, etc. We present a comprehensive and rigorously defined mapping of BPEL constructs onto Petri net structures and use this for the analysis of various dynamic properties related to unreachable activities, conflicting messages, garbage collection, conformance checking, and deadlocks and lifelocks in interaction processes. We use a mapping onto Petri nets because this allows us to use existing theoretical results and analysis tools. Unlike approaches based on finite state machines, we do not need to construct the state space and can use structural analysis (e.g., transition invariants) instead. We have implemented a tool that translates BPEL processes into Petri nets and then applies Petri-net-based analysis techniques. This tool has been tested on different examples and has been used to answer a variety of questions.