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Papers by Sankalita Mandal

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is here to stay, as applications increasingly make use of IoT device... more The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is here to stay, as applications increasingly make use of IoT devices to deliver value to customers and organizations. Smart home, predictive maintenance, asset tracking are just a few examples of business scenarios that employ the IoT. As concepts from the domain of Business Process Management (BPM) are used to realize IoT scenarios, the need arises to classify which scenarios can profit from BPM concepts. In this contribution, we present a range of IoT scenarios and discuss the dimensions to classify them. Further, we suggest the BPM concepts that might be advantageous to use for realizing IoT scenarios.

Today, business process management is a key for companies to represent their operations using bus... more Today, business process management is a key for companies to represent their operations using business process models. These business processes are executable using process engines. The process engines can produce and consume events for the completion of the processes. However, to receive the external events, we must rely on outer world sources such as a weather API, a traffic agency, an email from a different organization etc. While the digital world makes these message exchanges very convenient, there might still be some latency between the generation of a message and the detection of that message in a receiving process. This latency between the occurrence time and detection time of an event can cause a dilemma of choosing among the alternative paths triggered by racing events and might lead to wrong execution of a process. This problem is investigated in this paper. Also, some solutions are proposed to mitigate

Business operations include decisions having impact on their success and performance. The digital... more Business operations include decisions having impact on their success and performance. The digital world provides access to massive amount of data being relevant in decision making. After a decision, often succeeding activities are not immediately started or preparation activities are conducted. Meanwhile new information could be received which lead to a different decision output. Considering this can save organizations process cost or flow time. In this paper, we provide a concept to realize the re-evaluation of decisions based on event processing. We integrated a re-evaluation scope in business processes in which change of decision is still accepted and which dynamically subscribes to those events leading to new decision output. The concept is evaluated by a proof-of concept implementation and a single-case experiment on a logistic use case. There, re-evaluation was relevant for almost a quarter of the transports reducing the traveling time.

EMISA Forum, 2018

Business process management (BPM) enables modeling, implementing and monitoring organizational pr... more Business process management (BPM) enables modeling, implementing and monitoring organizational processes to achieve certain business goals. As organizations continue to strive for agility, they have started taking advantage of the digitization and bring flexibility in their processes by several means. One of these is to integrate complex event processing (CEP) with business processes. Event handling specifies how a process communicates with its environment and how this environment influences the execution of the process. Though highly expressive and feature-rich languages like BPMN exist for process specification, they still lack an unambiguous semantics for event handling in different situations. In this work, an event handling model is proposed that take into account the possibilities of subscribing to an event at different point in time with respect to process execution. The model is grounded with formal semantics using Petri Nets and trace analysis to ensure correct execution of...

To make use of the abundance of events produced by smart devices, social media, or the internet-o... more To make use of the abundance of events produced by smart devices, social media, or the internet-of-things (IoT), implemented business processes need to integrate external events. Thus, processes are event-driven applications that need to be tested correspondingly. However, testing with real-world events is hard, because those events cannot be controlled. Therefore, we suggest to use generated events for testing and implement an event generator component and demonstrate our approach using an use case from the IoT domain. This demo is aimed at practitioners and academics working with event-driven applications.

Case management allows knowledge workers to model and enact flexible, knowledge-intensive busines... more Case management allows knowledge workers to model and enact flexible, knowledge-intensive business processes. Such processes occur in many domains, e.g. logistics or healthcare, and the exact course of a case can not be pre-specified, because it heavily depends on case data, user decisions, and external events, which take place during runtime. This work extends our case management engine Chimera with the capability to incorporate external events. To this end we integrate Chimera with the event processing platform Unicorn, with the result that external events can now trigger new cases, provide case data, or abort activities. This demo is aimed at practitioners and academics in the field of flexible business processes and case management.

Event handling is a fundamental concept for the implementation of business processes. It enables ... more Event handling is a fundamental concept for the implementation of business processes. It enables the specification of how a process communicates with its environment and how this environment influences the execution of a process. However, even feature-rich languages for process specification such as BPMN are severely limited in their event handling semantics. They largely neglect the design choices to be made when deciding on when to subscribe to event sources and how to retrieve events for a particular process instance. In this paper, we therefore propose a model for event handling in business processes that is grounded in explicit subscriptions and event buffering. This model is integrated in BPMN using its extension mechanism and comes with formal execution semantics. Based on the latter, we further show how existing techniques for verification and adapter synthesis can be leveraged to analyse the interactions of a business process. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of our ...

2018 IEEE 22nd International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC), 2018

Business process management (BPM) enables modeling, executing and monitoring organizational proce... more Business process management (BPM) enables modeling, executing and monitoring organizational processes to achieve certain business goals. Organizations continue to strive for agility and take advantage of the digital era to bring flexibility in their processes, for example by integrating complex event processing (CEP) techniques. Event handling specifies how a process interacts with its environment and how the environmental occurrences influence the execution of the process. Though highly expressive and feature-rich languages like BPMN exist for process specification, they still lack the flexibility required for event handling in different real-life scenarios. In this work, an event handling model is proposed that take into account the possibilities of event subscription at different points in time with respect to process execution. The model is grounded formally and provides mapping to Petri Nets as implementation semantics. Further, trace analysis ensures correct execution of proce...

Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling

On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems. OTM 2017 Conferences

Business process management is essential for companies to document, execute, monitor, and optimiz... more Business process management is essential for companies to document, execute, monitor, and optimize their business processes. These processes are often influenced by external events occurring in the process context, especially when considering Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. Modeling constructs for different types of events are part of the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard. However, when the integration of external events needs to be supported by process-oriented information systems, the gap between conceptual process model and its implementation needs to be bridged. We elicited the requirements for this integration using an use case from the IoT domain. Based on them, we propose a framework that outsources the management of events to an event processing platform that the process engine subscribes to. The BPMN process model is extended with annotations to specify the type of expected events. Further, we implement a system that realizes the proposed integration..

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is here to stay, as applications increasingly make use of IoT device... more The Internet-of-Things (IoT) is here to stay, as applications increasingly make use of IoT devices to deliver value to customers and organizations. Smart home, predictive maintenance, asset tracking are just a few examples of business scenarios that employ the IoT. As concepts from the domain of Business Process Management (BPM) are used to realize IoT scenarios, the need arises to classify which scenarios can profit from BPM concepts. In this contribution, we present a range of IoT scenarios and discuss the dimensions to classify them. Further, we suggest the BPM concepts that might be advantageous to use for realizing IoT scenarios.

Today, business process management is a key for companies to represent their operations using bus... more Today, business process management is a key for companies to represent their operations using business process models. These business processes are executable using process engines. The process engines can produce and consume events for the completion of the processes. However, to receive the external events, we must rely on outer world sources such as a weather API, a traffic agency, an email from a different organization etc. While the digital world makes these message exchanges very convenient, there might still be some latency between the generation of a message and the detection of that message in a receiving process. This latency between the occurrence time and detection time of an event can cause a dilemma of choosing among the alternative paths triggered by racing events and might lead to wrong execution of a process. This problem is investigated in this paper. Also, some solutions are proposed to mitigate

Business operations include decisions having impact on their success and performance. The digital... more Business operations include decisions having impact on their success and performance. The digital world provides access to massive amount of data being relevant in decision making. After a decision, often succeeding activities are not immediately started or preparation activities are conducted. Meanwhile new information could be received which lead to a different decision output. Considering this can save organizations process cost or flow time. In this paper, we provide a concept to realize the re-evaluation of decisions based on event processing. We integrated a re-evaluation scope in business processes in which change of decision is still accepted and which dynamically subscribes to those events leading to new decision output. The concept is evaluated by a proof-of concept implementation and a single-case experiment on a logistic use case. There, re-evaluation was relevant for almost a quarter of the transports reducing the traveling time.

EMISA Forum, 2018

Business process management (BPM) enables modeling, implementing and monitoring organizational pr... more Business process management (BPM) enables modeling, implementing and monitoring organizational processes to achieve certain business goals. As organizations continue to strive for agility, they have started taking advantage of the digitization and bring flexibility in their processes by several means. One of these is to integrate complex event processing (CEP) with business processes. Event handling specifies how a process communicates with its environment and how this environment influences the execution of the process. Though highly expressive and feature-rich languages like BPMN exist for process specification, they still lack an unambiguous semantics for event handling in different situations. In this work, an event handling model is proposed that take into account the possibilities of subscribing to an event at different point in time with respect to process execution. The model is grounded with formal semantics using Petri Nets and trace analysis to ensure correct execution of...

To make use of the abundance of events produced by smart devices, social media, or the internet-o... more To make use of the abundance of events produced by smart devices, social media, or the internet-of-things (IoT), implemented business processes need to integrate external events. Thus, processes are event-driven applications that need to be tested correspondingly. However, testing with real-world events is hard, because those events cannot be controlled. Therefore, we suggest to use generated events for testing and implement an event generator component and demonstrate our approach using an use case from the IoT domain. This demo is aimed at practitioners and academics working with event-driven applications.

Case management allows knowledge workers to model and enact flexible, knowledge-intensive busines... more Case management allows knowledge workers to model and enact flexible, knowledge-intensive business processes. Such processes occur in many domains, e.g. logistics or healthcare, and the exact course of a case can not be pre-specified, because it heavily depends on case data, user decisions, and external events, which take place during runtime. This work extends our case management engine Chimera with the capability to incorporate external events. To this end we integrate Chimera with the event processing platform Unicorn, with the result that external events can now trigger new cases, provide case data, or abort activities. This demo is aimed at practitioners and academics in the field of flexible business processes and case management.

Event handling is a fundamental concept for the implementation of business processes. It enables ... more Event handling is a fundamental concept for the implementation of business processes. It enables the specification of how a process communicates with its environment and how this environment influences the execution of a process. However, even feature-rich languages for process specification such as BPMN are severely limited in their event handling semantics. They largely neglect the design choices to be made when deciding on when to subscribe to event sources and how to retrieve events for a particular process instance. In this paper, we therefore propose a model for event handling in business processes that is grounded in explicit subscriptions and event buffering. This model is integrated in BPMN using its extension mechanism and comes with formal execution semantics. Based on the latter, we further show how existing techniques for verification and adapter synthesis can be leveraged to analyse the interactions of a business process. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of our ...

2018 IEEE 22nd International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC), 2018

Business process management (BPM) enables modeling, executing and monitoring organizational proce... more Business process management (BPM) enables modeling, executing and monitoring organizational processes to achieve certain business goals. Organizations continue to strive for agility and take advantage of the digital era to bring flexibility in their processes, for example by integrating complex event processing (CEP) techniques. Event handling specifies how a process interacts with its environment and how the environmental occurrences influence the execution of the process. Though highly expressive and feature-rich languages like BPMN exist for process specification, they still lack the flexibility required for event handling in different real-life scenarios. In this work, an event handling model is proposed that take into account the possibilities of event subscription at different points in time with respect to process execution. The model is grounded formally and provides mapping to Petri Nets as implementation semantics. Further, trace analysis ensures correct execution of proce...

Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling

On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems. OTM 2017 Conferences

Business process management is essential for companies to document, execute, monitor, and optimiz... more Business process management is essential for companies to document, execute, monitor, and optimize their business processes. These processes are often influenced by external events occurring in the process context, especially when considering Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. Modeling constructs for different types of events are part of the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard. However, when the integration of external events needs to be supported by process-oriented information systems, the gap between conceptual process model and its implementation needs to be bridged. We elicited the requirements for this integration using an use case from the IoT domain. Based on them, we propose a framework that outsources the management of events to an event processing platform that the process engine subscribes to. The BPMN process model is extended with annotations to specify the type of expected events. Further, we implement a system that realizes the proposed integration..