Object-centric processes from A to Z

2nd International Workshop (co-located with BPM 2024)
Krakow, Poland 

About

Traditionally, processes are modelled and discovered primarily considering their control-flow dimension, while disregarding other key dimensions that affect the control flow, such as the data dimension. Consequently, the resulting models are unable to suitably represent real-life, widespread processes where behaviour arises from the complex interplay among multiple business objects and their one-to-many/many-to-many relationships. ​New paradigms that combine data and processes, such as object-centric processes, present new perspectives to the field of business process management, but also bring new challenges. 

On the one hand, object-centric processes toned to be correctly specified and modelled. Such multi-perspective models are intrinsically difficult to analyse. This calls for a suitable trade-off between expressiveness and feasibility of analytic techniques. In addition, object-centric models can span a complex network containing many processes and objects. Thus, they bring great potential to create models that cross process and organisational boundaries that current modelling techniques impose. 

On the other hand, process mining focus on the discovery and analysis of object-centric models from event data, which poses a twofold challenge. First, the current notion of event logs fail in representing event data for object-centric processes. Conventional event logs contain isolated traces, whereas object-centric processes require richer, relational and graph-structured representations of the event data. Second, novel process mining techniques and suitable event data/log formats have to be studied so as to operate over such complex data and fully unleash the insights hidden therein. This also brings the need to ensure that modelling constructs in object-centric process notations can be effectively and efficiently discovered and analysed. 

The main objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers from the fields of BPM and PM who work on object-centric process to share their ideas and current research and to discuss challenges and future directions of the field. 

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • object-centric process modelling (formal and conceptual foundations, best practices etc)
  • extensions of object-centric formalisms
  • syntactic and semantic properties, correctness criteria
  • object-centric process composition
  • collaborating object-centric processes
  • formal techniques for object-centric process analysis
  • object-centric event log formats
  • data preparation for object-centric log extraction
  • discovery, conformance checking and monitoring
  • conceptual foundations of object-centric process representation
  • object-awareness vs. object-centricity
  • experience reports on teaching object-centric processes
  • insightful surveys and case studies on adoption and application of object-centric approaches  
  • visionary papers 

Program

09:00 - 10:30

  • Opening 
  • Declarative Object-Centric Processes as DCR Graphs with Data: Modelling, Execution and Mining. Thomas Troels Hildebrandt  

    Abstract: The classical concept of objects, known from object-oriented programming, has gained momentum in the field of BPM in recent years. This shift is driven by the need to represent real-world business processes, where data is often shared across multiple processes and naturally attached to dynamically created objects such as orders, applications, and deliveries.

    The talk will discuss the combination of declarative behavioural constraints with data and objects, and in particular present how to extend the declarative Dynamic Condition Graphs notation and execution semantics with objects.

    We will also discuss future challenges and give examples of declarative object-centric modelling, execution and discovery for DCR Graphs, partly based on recent work on discovery of object-centric declarative models to be presented at ICPM 2024.


    Short bio: Thomas Hildebrandt is a professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen. He has a background in formal semantics of concurrent processes and has been active in the BPM community since more than 15 years. The most visible contribution of Thomas is his seminal and leading role in the development of the declarative Dynamic Condition Response (DCR) Graphs notation. DCR Graphs has successfully made the transition from academic research to industrial design and execution tools by DCRSolutions.net and the NEC WorkZone enterprise information system, which is used on a daily basis by 70% of Denmark’s public service and which is also also available in the UK and Australia.
     

11:00 - 12:30 (access to papers here)

  • Towards Object-centric BPMN Process Models (short paper). Anjo Seidel, Maximilian König and Mathias Weske  
  • Data Objects with Variables in BPMN (short paper). Maximilian König, Tom Lichtenstein, Anjo Seidel and Mathias Weske  
  • Coordination Process Verification for object-centric Business Processes. Lisa Arnold and Manfred Reichert  
  • Reflections  

14:00 - 15:30 (access to papers here)

  • From Chaos to Clarity: Using Object Centric Process Mining to Improve Efficiency in a Requisition Management System. Case Study (short paper, ONLINE). Anukriti Tripathi, Ayush Raj, Himanshu H, Rohini Nandan, Ranjana Vyas and O.P. Vyas  
  • Transforming Object-Centric Event Logs to Temporal Event Knowledge Graphs. Shahrzad Khayatbashi, Olaf Hartig and Amin Jalali  
  • Explainable Object-Centric Anomaly Detection: the Role of Domain Knowledge (short paper). Alessandro Berti, Urszula Jessen, Wil M.P. van der Aalst and Dirk Fahland  
  • Reflections  

16:00 - 17:30

  • Tutorial 1: Discovery of Instance Spanning Constraints and Exceptions. Karolin Winter, Eindhoven University of Technology 
  • Tutorial 2: Key modelling concerns and language constructs for object-centric processes. Marco Montali, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano 
  • Discussion and closing (access to the shared document here)  

Programme
Committee

Han van der Aa, University of Vienna, Austria
Wil van der Aalst, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Johannes De Smedt, KU Leuven, Belgium
Rik Eshuis, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Dirk Fahland, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Ekkart Kindler, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
Irina Lomazova, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia
Jan Mendling, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Giovanni Meroni, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
Jorge Munoz-Gama, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile
Artem Polyvyanyy, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Natalia Sidorova, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Monique Snoeck, KU Leuven, Belgium
Pnina Soffer, University of Haifa, Israel
Dominique Sommers, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Francesca Zerbato, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands 

Organizers

Marco Montali , Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Andrey Rivkin, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
Jan Martijn van der Werf, Utrecht University, The Netherlands