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Business Process Management


Workshops: BPM 2017 International
Workshops, Barcelona, Spain,
September 10-11, 2017, Revised
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Business Process Management Workshops: BPM 2018


International Workshops, Sydney, NSW, Australia,
September 9-14, 2018, Revised Papers Florian Daniel

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Business Process Management: 18th International


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Ernest Teniente
LNBIP 308 Matthias Weidlich (Eds.)

Business Process
Management Workshops
BPM 2017 International Workshops
Barcelona, Spain, September 10–11, 2017
Revised Papers

123
Lecture Notes
in Business Information Processing 308

Series Editors
Wil M. P. van der Aalst
RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany
John Mylopoulos
University of Trento, Trento, Italy
Michael Rosemann
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
Michael J. Shaw
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA
Clemens Szyperski
Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/7911
Ernest Teniente Matthias Weidlich (Eds.)

Business Process
Management Workshops
BPM 2017 International Workshops
Barcelona, Spain, September 10–11, 2017
Revised Papers

123
Editors
Ernest Teniente Matthias Weidlich
Department of Service and Information Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
System Engineering Berlin, Berlin
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya Germany
Barcelona
Spain

ISSN 1865-1348 ISSN 1865-1356 (electronic)


Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing
ISBN 978-3-319-74029-4 ISBN 978-3-319-74030-0 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74030-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963774

© Springer International Publishing AG 2018


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Printed on acid-free paper

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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Preface

Business process management (BPM) is a widely established discipline with a rich


body of techniques, methods, and tools. It is also a mature yet highly dynamic field of
research, which brings together scholars and industrial researchers from the computer
science, information systems, and management fields.
The 15th edition of the International Conference on Business Process Management
(BPM 2017) was held in Barcelona, Spain, during September 10–15, 2017. The BPM
conference series has a record of attracting innovative research of the highest quality
related to all aspects of BPM, including theory, frameworks, methods, techniques,
architectures, and empirical findings.
It is a tradition that several workshops precede the main BPM conference on a range
of BPM-related topics. The collective goal of these workshops is to promote
work-in-progress research that has not yet reached its full maturity, but that has a clear
goal and approach as well as promising insights or preliminary results.
In 2017, the following 11 workshops were hosted:
– BPAI 2017 – First International Workshop on Business Process Innovation with
Artificial Intelligence
– BPI 2017 – 13th International Workshop on Business Process Intelligence
– BP-Meet-IoT 2017 – First International Workshop on Ubiquitous Business Pro-
cesses Meeting Internet of Things
– BPMS2 2017 – 10th Workshop on Social and Human Aspects of Business Process
Management
– CBPM 2017 – First International Workshop on Cognitive Business Process
Management
– CCABPM 2017 – First International Workshop on Cross-Cutting Aspects of
Business Process Modeling
– DeHMiMoP 2017 – 5th International Workshop on Declarative/Decision/Hybrid
Mining and Modeling for Business Processes
– QD-PA 2017 – First International Workshop on Quality Data for Process Analytics
– REBPM 2017 – Third International Workshop on Interrelations Between
Requirements Engineering and Business Process Management
– SPBP 2017 – First Workshop on Security and Privacy-Enhanced Business Process
Management
– TAProViz-PQ-IWPE 2017 – Joint International BPM 2017 Workshops on Theory
and Application of Visualizations and Human-Centric Aspects in Processes
(TAProViz 2017), Process Querying (PQ 2017) and Process Engineering (IWPE
2017)
Some of these workshops are well established, having been held for several years.
They address long-standing challenges such as how to seamlessly incorporate social
and human aspects into process improvement and innovation methods, or how
VI Preface

to leverage data analytics techniques for process and decision management. Around
half of the workshops, however, were held in their first edition this year. These latter
workshops address emerging concerns such as the Internet of Things, artificial intel-
ligence applied to business process innovation, BPM applied to e-government, cog-
nitive business process management, or quality data for process analytics.
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the individual workshop chairs for
their effort to promote, coordinate, and animate their respective workshops and for
arranging entertaining, high-quality programs that were well received by the attendees.
We are also grateful for the service of the countless reviewers, who supported the
workshop chairs and provided valuable feedback to the authors. Several workshops had
invited keynote presentations that framed the presented research papers and we would
like to thank the keynote speakers for sharing their insights. We would also like to
thank Ralf Gerstner and the team at Springer for their support in the publication of this
LNBIP volume.
Finally, we are grateful to Josep Carmona and the members of his team for all their
efforts in organizing the BPM 2017 conference and the BPM 2017 workshops.

November 2017 Ernest Teniente


Matthias Weidlich
Contents

1st International Workshop on Business Process Innovation


with Artificial Intelligence (BPAI 2017)

Introduction to the 1st International Workshop on Business Process


Innovation with Artificial Intelligence (BPAI 2017). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Riccardo De Masellis, Chiara Di Francescomarino, Jana Koehler,
Fabrizio Maria Maggi, Marco Montali, Arik Senderovich,
Biplav Srivastava, and Heiner Stuckenschmidt

What Automated Planning Can Do for Business Process Management . . . . . . 7


Andrea Marrella

Structural Feature Selection for Event Logs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20


Markku Hinkka, Teemu Lehto, Keijo Heljanko,
and Alexander Jung

Towards Intelligent Process Support for Customer Service Desks:


Extracting Problem Descriptions from Noisy and Multi-lingual Texts . . . . . . 36
Jana Koehler, Etienne Fux, Florian A. Herzog, Dario Lötscher,
Kai Waelti, Roland Imoberdorf, and Dirk Budke

Towards an Entropy-Based Analysis of Log Variability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53


Christoffer Olling Back, Søren Debois, and Tijs Slaats

Objective Coordination with Business Artifacts and Social Engagements . . . . 71


Matteo Baldoni, Cristina Baroglio, Federico Capuzzimati,
and Roberto Micalizio

Enhancing Workflow-Nets with Data for Trace Completion . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89


Riccardo De Masellis, Chiara Di Francescomarino, Chiara Ghidini,
and Sergio Tessaris

Optimal Paths in Business Processes: Framework and Applications . . . . . . . . 107


Marco Comuzzi

An Agent-Based Model of a Business Process: The Use Case


of a Hospital Emergency Department. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124
Emilio Sulis and Antonio Di Leva

Constraint-Based Composition of Business Process Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133


Piotr Wiśniewski, Krzysztof Kluza, Mateusz Ślażyński,
and Antoni Ligęza
VIII Contents

Semantically-Oriented Business Process Visualization


for a Data and Constraint-Based Workflow Approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142
Eric Rietzke, Ralph Bergmann, and Norbert Kuhn

Abduction for Generating Synthetic Traces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151


Federico Chesani, Anna Ciampolini, Daniela Loreti,
and Paola Mello

13th International Workshop on Business


Process Intelligence (BPI 2017)

Introduction to the 13th International Workshop on Business Process


Intelligence (BPI 2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 162
Boudewijn van Dongen, Jochen De Weerdt, Andrea Burattin,
and Jan Claes

A Framework for Online Conformance Checking . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165


Andrea Burattin and Josep Carmona

Recurrent Process Mining with Live Event Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178


Alifah Syamsiyah, Boudewijn F. van Dongen,
and Wil M. P. van der Aalst

Reducing Event Variability in Logs by Clustering of Word Embeddings . . . . 191


David Sánchez-Charles, Josep Carmona, Victor Muntés-Mulero,
and Marc Solé

Automatic Root Cause Identification Using Most Probable Alignments . . . . . 204


Marie Koorneef, Andreas Solti, Henrik Leopold, and Hajo A. Reijers

Improving Process Discovery Results by Filtering Outliers Using


Conditional Behavioural Probabilities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216
Mohammadreza Fani Sani, Sebastiaan J. van Zelst,
and Wil M. P. van der Aalst

Can We Find Better Process Models? Process Model Improvement


Using Motif-Based Graph Adaptation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230
Alexander Seeliger, Michael Stein, and Max Mühlhäuser

Dropout Prediction in MOOCs: A Comparison Between Process


and Sequence Mining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243
Galina Deeva, Johannes De Smedt, Pieter De Koninck,
and Jochen De Weerdt

Process Mining and the Black Swan: An Empirical Analysis


of the Influence of Unobserved Behavior on the Quality
of Mined Process Models. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256
Jana-Rebecca Rehse, Peter Fettke, and Peter Loos
Contents IX

1st International Workshop on Business Processes Meet


Internet-of-Things (BP-Meet-IoT 2017)

1st International Workshop on Business Processes Meet Internet-of-Things


(BP-Meet-IoT 2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270
Agnes Koschmider, Massimo Mecella, Estefania Serral Asensio,
and Victoria Torres

Technology-Enhanced Process Elicitation of Worker Activities


in Manufacturing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273
Sönke Knoch, Shreeraman Ponpathirkoottam, Peter Fettke,
and Peter Loos

Discovering Process Models of Activities of Daily Living


from Sensors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
Marco Cameranesi, Claudia Diamantini, and Domenico Potena

An Habit Is a Process: A BPM-Based Approach for Smart Spaces . . . . . . . . 298


Daniele Sora, Francesco Leotta, and Massimo Mecella

From BPM to IoT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310


Sylvain Cherrier and Varun Deshpande

10th Workshop on Social and Human Aspects of Business Process


Management (BPMS2 2017)

Introduction to the BPMS2 Workshop 2017 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320


Rainer Schmidt and Selmin Nurcan

Lightweight Process Support with Spreadsheet-Driven Processes:


A Case Study in the Finance Domain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323
Michael Stach, Rüdiger Pryss, Maximilian Schnitzlein,
Tim Mohring, Martin Jurisch, and Manfred Reichert

Using CMMN to Model Social Processes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335


Ioannis Routis, Mara Nikolaidou,
and Dimosthenis Anagnostopoulos

Speech Acts in Actual Processes: Evaluation of Interfaces


and Triggers in ITIL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348
Johannes Tenschert, Jana-Rebecca Rehse, Peter Fettke,
and Richard Lenz

SLA-Based Management of Human-Based Services in Business


Processes for Socio-Technical Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
Mirela Riveni, Tien-Dung Nguyen, and Schahram Dustdar
X Contents

Using Smart Edge Devices to Integrate Consumers into Digitized


Processes: The Case of Amazon Dash-Button . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 374
Michael Möhring, Barbara Keller, Rainer Schmidt, Lara Pietzsch,
Leila Karich, Carolin Berhalter, and Karsten Kilian

Towards a Solution Space for BPM Issues Based


on Debiasing Techniques . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 384
Maryam Razavian, Irene Vanderfeesten,
and Oktay Turetken

A Framework for Improving User Engagement in Social BPM . . . . . . . . . . . 391


Vanisha Gokaldas and Mohammad Ehson Rangiha

A Systematic Literature Review of the Use of Social Media for Business


Process Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403
Jana Prodanova and Amy Van Looy

1st International Workshop on Cognitive Business


Process Management (CBPM 2017)

Introduction to the 1st International Workshop on Cognitive Business


Process Management (CBPM’17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 416
Hamid R. Motahari Nezhad, Richard Hull, and Boualem Bentallah

Cognitive Computing: What’s in for Business Process Management?


An Exploration of Use Case Ideas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419
Maximilian Roeglinger, Johannes Seyfried, Simon Stelzl,
and Michael zur Muehlen

Cognitive Business Process Management for Adaptive


Cyber-Physical Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 429
Andrea Marrella and Massimo Mecella

BPM for the Masses: Empowering Participants of Cognitive


Business Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 440
Aleksander Slominski and Vinod Muthusamy

Using Insights from Cognitive Neuroscience to Investigate


the Effects of Event-Driven Process Chains on Process
Model Comprehension . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 446
Michael Zimoch, Tim Mohring, Rüdiger Pryss, Thomas Probst,
Winfried Schlee, and Manfred Reichert

Knowledge-intensive Process: A Research Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 460


Flávia Maria Santoro and Fernanda Araujo Baião
Contents XI

1st International Workshop on Cross-cutting Aspects


of Business Process Modeling (CCABPM 2017)

Introduction to the Workshop on Cross-cutting Aspects of Business


Process Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 470
Jörg Becker, Stefanie Betz, Cristina Cabanillas, Claudia Cappelli,
Leticia Duboc, and Nadine Ogonek

Towards a Taxonomy of Human Resource Allocation Criteria . . . . . . . . . . . 475


Michael Arias, Jorge Munoz-Gama, and Marcos Sepúlveda

E-Government Services: Comparing Real and Expected User Behavior . . . . . 484


A. A. Kalenkova, A. A. Ageev, I. A. Lomazova,
and W. M. P. van der Aalst

Establishing Transparent Interorganizational Relationships


Through Shared Goals for Anti-corruption in Brazil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 497
Bruna Diirr and Claudia Cappelli

Towards Guidelines of Modeling for Ecology-Aware Process Design . . . . . . 510


Patrick Lübbecke, Peter Fettke, and Peter Loos

Sustainability Performance Measurement: A Preliminary Classification


Framework of Models and Indicators. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 520
Dries Couckuyt, Amy Van Looy, and Manu De Backer

5th International Workshop on Declarative/Decision/Hybrid


Mining and Modeling for Business Processes (DeHMiMoP 2017)

5th International Workshop on Declarative/Decision/Hybrid Mining


and Modeling for Business Processes (DeHMiMoP’17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 526
Jan Vanthienen, Claudio Di Ciccio, Hajo A. Reijers, Tijs Slaats,
Dennis Schunselaar, and Søren Debois

Challenges in Refactoring Processes to Include Decision Modelling . . . . . . . 529


Faruk Hasić, Lesly Devadder, Maxim Dochez, Jonas Hanot,
Johannes De Smedt, and Jan Vanthienen

Data-Centric Extraction of DMN Decision Models


from BPMN Process Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 542
Ekaterina Bazhenova, Francesca Zerbato, and Mathias Weske

Discovering Business Rules in Knowledge-Intensive Processes


Through Decision Mining: An Experimental Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 556
Júlio Campos, Pedro Richetti, Fernanda Araújo Baião,
and Flávia Maria Santoro
XII Contents

1st International Workshop on Quality Data for Process


Analytics (QD-PA 2017)

Introduction to the First International Workshop on Quality


Data for Process Analytics (QD-PA 2017) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 570
Moe Thandar Wynn, Marco Comuzzi, Minseok Song,
and Lijie Wen

Redo Log Process Mining in Real Life: Data Challenges


& Opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 573
E. González López de Murillas, G. E. Hoogendoorn,
and Hajo A. Reijers

From Relational Database to Event Log: Decisions


with Quality Impact. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 588
Mieke Jans and Pnina Soffer

Design-Time Analysis of Data Inaccuracy Awareness at Runtime . . . . . . . . . 600


Yotam Evron, Pnina Soffer, and Anna Zamansky

3rd International Workshop on Interrelations


Between Requirements Engineering and Business
Process Management (REBPM 2017)

Introduction to the 3rd International Workshop on Interrelations


Between Requirements Engineering and Business Process
Management (REBPM’17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 614
Rüdiger Weißbach, Banu Aysolmaz, and Robert Heinrich

An Organizational Routines Perspective on Process Requirements . . . . . . . . . 617


Sabrina Blaukopf and Jan Mendling

Variability Patterns for Analyzing Flexible Processes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 623


Kathrin Kirchner and Ralf Laue

A Pattern-Based Question Checklist for Deriving Requirements


from BPMN Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 630
Bernhard M. Turban and Johannes Schmitz-Lenders

Minimal Effort Requirements Engineering for Robotic Process


Automation with Test Driven Development and Screen Recording . . . . . . . . 642
Christoph Cewe, Daniel Koch, and Robert Mertens

Optimization of the Inception Deck Technique for Eliciting


Requirements in SCRUM Through Business Process Models . . . . . . . . . . . . 649
Manuel Pastrana, Hugo Ordóñez, Armando Ordonez,
Lucinéia Heloisa Thom, and Luis Merchan
Contents XIII

Successful Post Merger Process Harmonization in the Triangle


of Methodologies, Capabilities and Acceptance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 656
Irene M. Schönreiter

A Reflection on the Interrelations Between Business Process


Management and Requirements Engineering with an Agility Perspective . . . . 669
Banu Aysolmaz, Mehmet Gürsul, Kathrin Kirchner, Ralf Laue,
Robert Mertens, Felix Reher, Irene M. Schönreiter,
Bernhard M. Turban, and Rüdiger Weißbach

1st Workshop on Security and Privacy-Enhanced Business Process


Management (SPBP 2017)

Preface to the Workshop on Security and Privacy-Enhanced


Business Process Management (SPBP’17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 682
Raimundas Matulevičius, Nicolas Mayer, and Ingo Weber

Personal Data Management: An Abstract Personal Data Lifecycle Model . . . . 685


Majed Alshammari and Andrew Simpson

Improvement of Security Costs Evaluation Process by Using Data


Automatically Captured from BPMN and EPC Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 698
Dmitrij Olifer, Nikolaj Goranin, Justinas Janulevicius,
Arnas Kaceniauskas, and Antanas Cenys

Joint International BPM 2017 Workshops on Theory


and Application of Visualizations and Human-Centric Aspects
in Processes (TAProViz 2017), Process Querying (PQ 2017),
and Process Engineering (IWPE 2017)

Introduction to the Joint International BPM 2017 Workshops


on Theory and Application of Visualizations and Human-Centric
Aspects in Processes (TAProViz’17), Process Querying (PQ’17)
and Process Engineering (IWPE’17) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 712
Ross Brown, María Teresa Gómez-López, Simone Kriglstein,
Henrik Leopold, Artem Polyvyanyy, Manfred Reichert,
Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede,
Lucinéia Heloisa Thom, and Pablo David Villarreal

AO-BPM 2.0: Aspect Oriented Business Process Modeling . . . . . . . . . . . . . 719


Luiz Paulo Carvalho, Claudia Cappelli, and Flávia Maria Santoro

A Visualization of Human Physical Risks in Manufacturing Processes


Using BPMN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 732
Melanie Polderdijk, Irene Vanderfeesten, Jonnro Erasmus,
Kostas Traganos, Tim Bosch, Gu van Rhijn, and Dirk Fahland
XIV Contents

Visual Analytics for Soundness Verification of Process Models . . . . . . . . . . 744


Humberto S. Garcia Caballero, Michel A. Westenberg,
Henricus M. W. Verbeek, and Wil M. P. van der Aalst

An Architecture for Querying Business Process, Business Process


Instances, and Business Data Models. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 757
María Teresa Gómez-López, Antonia M. Reina Quintero,
Luisa Parody, José Miguel Pérez Álvarez, and Manfred Reichert

Formal Semantics for Modeling Collaborative Business Processes


Based on Interaction Protocols . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 770
Emiliano Reynares, Jorge Roa, María Laura Caliusco,
and Pablo David Villarreal

Design of an Extensible BPMN Process Simulator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 782


Luise Pufahl, Tsun Yin Wong, and Mathias Weske

Author Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 797


1st International Workshop on Business
Process Innovation with Artificial
Intelligence (BPAI 2017)
Introduction to the 1st International Workshop
on Business Process Innovation with Artificial
Intelligence (BPAI 2017)

Riccardo De Masellis1, Chiara Di Francescomarino1, Jana Koehler2,


Fabrizio Maria Maggi3, Marco Montali4, Arik Senderovich5,
Biplav Srivastava6, and Heiner Stuckenschmidt7
1
Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy
{r.demasellis,dfmchiara}@fbk.eu
2
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Lucerne, Switzerland
jana.koehler@hslu.ch
3
University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia
f.m.maggi@ut.ee
4
Free University of Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy
montali@inf.unibz.it
5
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa, Israel
sariks@technion.ac.il
6
IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, USA
biplavs@us.ibm.com
7
University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany
heiner@informatik.uni-mannheim.de

Abstract. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is receiving high interest from academics,


business professionals, and media. It is considered as the next disruptive tech-
nology that will significantly impact the workplace and change, innovate, and
automate a manifold of business activities. The goal of the workshop was to
foster the exchange between AI and Business Process Management (BPM) by
taking a closer look at how BPM inspires novel application domains for AI, as
well as at how BPM and related fields can benefit from AI solutions. Six full and
four short papers were accepted for presentation at the workshop. They stim-
ulated an interesting discussion on potential future synergies between the two
disciplines.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence • Machine learning


Business process modelling • Business process mining

1 Aims and Scope

AI is receiving high interest from academics, business professionals, and media, being
considered as the next disruptive technology that will impact millions of jobs and
change, innovate, and automate a manifold of business activities.
AI examples are:
Introduction to the 1st International Workshop on Business Process Innovation 3

• Machine Learning and decision-theoretic models for data analysis, e.g., predictive
monitoring and customer segmentation;
• Constraint reasoning and related algorithms as the key technology underlying
business rule engines;
• Search algorithms for process optimization;
• Intelligent assistants and companions.
These are only a few examples of what AI technology can do to improve and
reengineer business processes. Recently, major IT companies have developed cognitive
services to make AI technology ready to use for developing applications. Many large
companies started projects to plug these services into their processes or to develop their
own AI solutions based on these services. At the same time, AI researchers are dis-
cussing safety issues and identifying important sources of risks in AI solutions.
The workshop identified many potential sources for synergies between AI and
BPM. On the one hand, several AI solutions can be used in the context of BPM, e.g.,
planning for adapting or composing business processes, machine learning for process
mining and analysis, constraint reasoning for process transformation, verification, and
compliance checking.
On the other hand, AI will influence the role of humans within a business process
and solutions should be developed to address questions such as novel requirements on
employee qualification, shared responsibilities between AI and humans, control and
impact of automated decision making.
Six full and four short papers were presented at the workshop. The focus of the
papers ranged from leveraging Machine Learning approaches for addressing BPM
problems to applying planning approaches in BPM scenarios on the one hand, and from
analyzing event logs using AI techniques to finding optimal paths in business processes
on the other hand.
In particular, Hinkka and colleagues addressed the problem of classifying business
process instances based on structural features derived from event logs. Back and col-
leagues investigated how different measures for entropy could be used to give insights
on the complexity of an event log and could act as an indicator of which paradigm
(imperative or declarative) should be used for process mining. Comuzzi presented a
framework for calculating optimal execution paths in business processes by relying on
workflow hypergraph abstraction and using an ant-colony optimisation customised for
the hypergraph traversal. Koehler and colleagues showed how AI can support service
processes in a variety of ways by proposing three intelligent assistants that support
service employees in their complex tasks. Baldoni and colleagues proposed to enrich
the definition of business artifact with a normative layer by relying on a multiagent
systems approach. De Masellis and colleagues focused on automatically repairing
traces with missing information by notably considering not only activities but also data
manipulated by them. Wiśniewski and Kluza presented a method of business process
composition based on constraint programming. Rietzke and colleagues presented a
semantically oriented business process visualization approach developed using a
knowledge-based system. Chesani and colleagues leveraged on the abductive declar-
ative language SCIFF for the realization of an event log generator. Finally, Sulis and Di
4 R. De Masellis et al.

Leva applied simulation approaches to a real case study of an hospital emergency


department.
The importance of the synergy between the AI and BPM fields also came out in the
keynote by Andrea Marrella. He showed how automated planning techniques can be
leveraged to enable new levels of automation and support for BPM. He discussed
several concrete examples of successful application of AI techniques to the different
stages of the BPM lifecycle.
The workshop ended with an interesting panel session about the relevance of the
synergy between AI and BPM for both fields. Moreover, the discussion covered the
future of the BPAI workshop. Everybody agreed to continue this experience at the next
year’s BPM conference and to take the chance to further foster the interaction between
AI and BPM by targeting with the call for paper also other research areas at the
intersection between the two fields.
To sum up, the workshop received a significant number of submissions and a good
attendance. It clearly showed the strong interest of the BPM community in how the AI
and BPM fields can potentially fertilize each other. Of course, many of the questions
raised in the call for papers remained unaddressed by this year’s submissions, e.g.,
assessing the business risks of AI technologies, understanding the interplay of humans
and robots in business processes, using AI technologies such as AI planning to create
dynamic business processes. However, we believe that this only shows how much more
can be done in the future in this research direction.

2 Workshop Co-organizers

Riccardo De Masellis Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy


Chiara Di Francescomarino Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
Jana Koehler Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts,
Switzerland
Fabrizio Maria Maggi University of Tartu, Estonia
Marco Montali Free University of Bolzano, Italy
Arik Senderovich Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, Israel
Biplav Srivastava IBM Research, USA
Heiner Stuckenschmidt University of Mannheim, Germany

3 Program Committee

Rama Akkiraju IBM Almaden Research, USA


Ralph Bergmann University of Trier, Germany
Andrea Burattin University of Innsbruck, Austria
Federico Chesani University of Bologna, Italy
Raffaele Conforti Queensland University, Australia
Giuseppe De Giacomo Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Claudio Di Ciccio Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
Introduction to the 1st International Workshop on Business Process Innovation 5

Peter Fettke German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DKFI),


Germany
Chiara Ghidini Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
Anna Leontjeva University of Tartu, Estonia
Henrik Leopold Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
Andrea Marrella Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Paola Mello University of Bologna, Italy
Fabio Patrizi Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Giulio Petrucci Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
Andreas Rogge-Solti Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria
Ute Schmid University of Bamberg, Germany
Irene Teinemaa University of Tartu, Estonia
Stefano Teso University of Trento, Italy
Ingo Weber University of New South Wales, Australia
What Automated Planning Can Do for Business
Process Management

Andrea Marrella(B)

Sapienza - University of Rome, Rome, Italy


marrella@diag.uniroma1.it

Abstract. Business Process Management (BPM) is a central element


of today organizations. Despite over the years its main focus has
been the support of processes in highly controlled domains, nowadays
many domains of interest to the BPM community are characterized
by ever-changing requirements, unpredictable environments and increas-
ing amounts of data that influence the execution of process instances.
Under such dynamic conditions, BPM systems must increase their level
of automation to provide the reactivity and flexibility necessary for pro-
cess management. On the other hand, the Artificial Intelligence (AI)
community has concentrated its efforts on investigating dynamic domains
that involve active control of computational entities and physical devices
(e.g., robots, software agents, etc.). In this context, Automated Planning,
which is one of the oldest areas in AI, is conceived as a model-based
approach to synthesize autonomous behaviours in automated way from
a model. In this paper, we discuss how automated planning techniques
can be leveraged to enable new levels of automation and support for busi-
ness processing, and we show some concrete examples of their successful
application to the different stages of the BPM life cycle.

1 Introduction
Business Process Management (BPM) is a central element of today organiza-
tions due to its potential for increase productivity and saving costs. To this aim,
BPM research reports on techniques and tools to support the design, enact-
ment and optimization of business processes [1]. Despite over the years the main
focus of BPM has been the support of processes in highly controlled domains
(e.g., financial and accounting domains), nowadays BPM research is expand-
ing towards new challenging domains (e.g., healthcare [2], smart manufacturing
[3], emergency management [4,5], etc.), characterized by ever-changing require-
ments, unpredictable environments and increasing amounts of data that influence
the execution of process instances [6]. Under such dynamic conditions, BPM is
in need of techniques that go beyond hard-coded solutions that put all the bur-
den on IT professionals, which often lack the needed knowledge to model all
possible contingencies at the outset, or this knowledge can become obsolete as
process instances are executed and evolve, by making useless their initial effort.
Therefore, there are compelling reasons to introduce intelligent techniques that
c Springer International Publishing AG 2018
E. Teniente and M. Weidlich (Eds.): BPM 2017 Workshops, LNBIP 308, pp. 7–19, 2018.
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74030-0_1
8 A. Marrella

act autonomously to provide the reactivity and flexibility necessary for process
management [7,8].
On the other hand, the challenge of building computational entities and phys-
ical devices (e.g., robots, software agents, etc.) capable of autonomous behaviour
under dynamic conditions is at the center of the Artificial Intelligence (AI)
research from its origins. At the core of this challenge lies the action selec-
tion problem, often referred as the problem of selecting the action to do next.
Traditional hard-coded solutions require to consider every option available at
every instant in time based on the current context and pre-scripted plans to
compute just one next action. Consequently, they are usually biased and tend
to constrain their search in some way. For AI researchers, the question of action
selection is: what is the best way to constrain this search? To answer this ques-
tion, the AI community has tackled the action selection problem through two
different approaches [9], one based on learning and the other based on modeling.
In the learning-based approach, the controller that prescribes the action to
do next is learned from the experience. Learning methods, if properly trained
on representative datasets, have the greatest promise and potential, as they are
able to discover and eventually interpret meaningful patterns for a given task
in order to help make more efficient decisions. For example, learning techniques
were recently applied in BPM (see [10]) for predicting future states or properties
of ongoing executions of a business process. However, a learned solution is usually
a “black box”, i.e., there is not a clear understanding of how and why it has been
chosen. Consequently, the ability to explain why a learned solution has failed and
fix a reported quality bug may become a complex task.
Conversely, in the model-based approach the controller in charge of action
selection is derived automatically from a model that expresses the dynamics of
the domain of interest, the actions and goal conditions. The key point is that all
models are conceived to be general, i.e., they are not bound to specific domains
or problems. The price for generality is computational : The problem of solving
a model is computationally intractable in the worst case, even for the simplest
models [9].
While we acknowledge that both the learning and model-based approaches to
action selection exhibit different merits and limitations, in this paper we focus on
a specific model-based approach called Automated Planning. Automated plan-
ning is the branch of AI that concerns the automated synthesis of autonomous
behaviours (in the form of strategies or action sequences) for specific classes of
mathematical models represented in compact form. In recent years, the auto-
mated planning community has developed a plethora of planning systems (also
known as planners) that embed very effective (i.e., scale up to large problems)
domain-independent heuristics, which has been employed to solve collections of
challenging problems from several Computer Science domains.
In this paper, we discuss how automated planning techniques can be lever-
aged for solving real-world problems in BPM that were previously tackled with
hard-coded solutions by enabling new levels of automation and support for
business processing and we show some concrete examples of their successful
What Automated Planning Can Do for BPM 9

application to the different stages of the BPM life cycle. Specifically, while in
Sect. 2 we introduce some preliminary notions on automated planning necessary
to understand the rest of the paper, in Sect. 3 we show how instances of some
well-known problems from the BPM literature (such as process modeling, process
adaptation and conformance checking) can be represented as planning problems
for which planners can find a correct solution in a finite amount of time. Finally,
in Sect. 4 we conclude the paper by providing a critical discussion about the
general applicability of planning techniques in BPM and tracing future work.

2 Automated Planning

Automated planning addresses the problem of generating autonomous


behaviours (i.e., plans) from a model that describes how actions work in a
domain of interest, what is the initial state of the world and the goal to be
achieved. To this aim, automated planning operates on explicit representations
of states and actions.
The Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) [11] is a de-facto stan-
dard to formulate a compact representation of a planning problem PR =
I, G, PD , where I is the description of the initial state of the world, G is
the desired goal state, and PD is the planning domain. A planning domain PD
is built from a set of propositions describing the state of the world in which
planning takes place (a state is characterized by the set of propositions that are
true) and a set of actions Ω that can be executed in the domain. An action
schema a ∈ Ω is of the form a = Para , Prea , Effa , Costa , where Para is the list
of input parameters for a, Prea defines the preconditions under which a can be
executed, Effa specifies the effects of a on the state of the world and Costa is
the cost of executing a. Both preconditions and effects are stated in terms of the
propositions in PD , which can be represented through boolean predicates. PDDL
includes also the ability of defining domain objects and of typing the parameters
that appear in actions and predicates. In a state, only actions whose precondi-
tions are fulfilled can be executed. The values of propositions in PD can change
as result of the execution of actions, which, in turn, lead PD to a new state.
A planner that takes in input a planning problem PR is able to automatically
produce a plan P , i.e., a controller that specifies which actions are required to
transform the initial state I into a state satisfying the goal G.

Example 1. Let us consider a well-known domain in AI: the Blocks World. In


Fig. 1 it is shown an instance of this domain where blocks A, B and C are initial
arranged on the table. The goal is to re-arrange the blocks so that C is on A
and A is on B.
The problem can be easily expressed as a planning problem in PDDL. The
variables are the block locations: Blocks can be on the table or on top of another
block. Two predicates can be used to express (respectively) that a block is clear
(i.e., with no block on top) or has another block on top of it. A single planning
action move is required to represent the movement of a clear block on top of
10 A. Marrella

Fig. 1. A plan that solves a simple planning problem from the Blocks World domain.

another block or on the table. Figure 1 shows a possible solution to the problem,
which consists of first moving A from the table on top of B (state S1 ), and then
on moving C from the table on top of A (state S2 ). Since S2 is a state satisfying
the goal G, the solution found is a valid plan. Furthermore, if we assume that
the cost of any move action is equal to 1 (i.e., the cost of the plan corresponds to
its length), then the plan found is optimal, as it contains the minimum number
of planning actions to solve the problem. 


There exist several forms of planning models in the AI literature, which


result from the application of some orthogonal dimensions [12]: uncertainty in the
initial state (fully or partially known) and in the actions dynamics (deterministic
or not), the type of feedback (full, partial or no state feedback) and whether
uncertainty is represented by sets of states or probability distributions. The
simplest form of planning where actions are deterministic, the initial state is
known and plans are action sequences computed in advance is called Classical
Planning. For classical planning, according to [9], the general problem of coming
up with a plan is NP-hard, since the number of problem states is exponential
in the number of problem variables. For example, in a arbitrary Blocks World
problem with n blocks, the number of states is exponential in n, since the states
include all the n! possible towers of n blocks plus additional combinations of
lower towers.
Despite its complexity, the field of classical planning has experienced spec-
tacular advances (in terms of scalability) in the last 20 years, leading to a variety
of concrete planners that are able to feasibly compute plans with thousands of
actions over huge search spaces for real-world problems containing hundreds of
propositions. Such progresses have been possible because state-of-the-art classi-
cal planners employ powerful heuristic functions that are automatically derived
by the specific problem and allow to intelligently drive the search towards the
goal. In addition, since the classical approach of solving planning problems can
be too restrictive for environments in which information completeness can not
be guaranteed, it is often possible to solve non-classical planning problems using
classical planners by means of well-defined transformations [13]. A tutorial intro-
duction to planning algorithms and heuristics can be found in [9].
What Automated Planning Can Do for BPM 11

3 Automated Planning for BPM


The planning paradigm (in particular in its classical setting) provides a valuable
set of theoretical and practical tools to tackle several challenges addressed by
the BPM community and its use may lead to several advantages:

– Planning models are general, in the sense that a planner can be fed with the
description of any planning problem in PDDL (as defined in Sect. 2) without
knowing what the actions and domain stand for, and for any such description
it can synthesize a plan achieving the goal. This means that planners can
potentially solve any BPM problem that can be converted into a planning
problem in PDDL.
– Planning models are human-comprehensible, as the PDDL language allows to
describe the planning domain and problem of interest in a high-level termi-
nology, which is readily accessible and understandable by IT professionals.
– The standardized representation of a planning model in PDDL allows to
exploit a large repertoire of planners and searching algorithms with very lim-
ited effort.
– Planning models, if encoded with the classical approach, constitute implicit
representations of finite state controllers, and can be thus queried by standard
verification techniques, such as Model Checking.
– BPM environments can invoke planners as external services. Therefore, no
expertise of the internal working of the planners is required to build a plan.
A number of research works exist on the use of planning techniques in the
context of BPM, covering the various stages of the process life cycle. For the
design-time phase, existing literature has focused on exploiting planning to auto-
matically generate candidate process models that are able of achieving some busi-
ness goals starting from a complete or an incomplete description of the process
domain. Some research works also exist that use planning to deal with problems
for the run-time phase, e.g., to adapt running processes to cope with anomalous
situations. Finally, for the diagnosis phase, the literature reports some works
that use planning to perform conformance checking.
In the following sections we discuss in the detail how the use of planning has
contributed to tackle the above research challenges from BPM literature.

3.1 Planning for the Automated Generation of Process Models

Process modeling is the first and most important step in the BPM life cycle,
which intends to provide a high-level specification of a business process that
is independent from implementation and serves as a basis for process automa-
tion and verification. Traditional process models are usually well-structured, i.e.,
they reflect highly repeatable and predictable routine work with low flexibility
requirements. All possible options and decisions that can be made during pro-
cess enactment are statically pre-defined at design-time and embedded in the
control-flow of the process.
12 A. Marrella

Challenge. Current BPM technology is generally based on rigid process models


making its application difficult in dynamic and possibly evolving domains, where
pre-specifying the entire process model is not always possible. This problem can
be mitigated through specific approaches to process variability [14], which allow
to customize a base process model by implementing specific variants of the pro-
cess itself. However, this activity is time-consuming and error-prone when more
flexible processes are to be modeled, due to their context-dependent nature that
make difficult the specification of all the potential tasks interactions and process
variants in advance. The presence of mechanisms that facilitate the design phase
of flexible processes by allowing the automated generation of their underlying
models is highly desirable [7].
Application of Planning. The work [15] presents the basic idea behind the
use of planning techniques for the automated generation of a process model.
Process activities can be represented as planning actions together with their
preconditions and effects stating what contextual data may constrain the process
execution or may be affected after an activity completion. The planning domain
is therefore enriched with a set of propositions that characterize the contextual
data describing the process domain. Given an initial description of the process
domain, the target is to automatically obtain a plan (i.e., a process model and its
control-flow) that consists of process activities contextually selected and ordered
in a way to satisfy some business goals.
In the research literature, there are four main approaches that use planning
on the basis of the general schema outlined above. In [16], the authors exploit
a planner for modeling processes in SHAMASH, a knowledge-based system for
the design of business processes. The planner, which is fed with a semantic
representation of the process knowledge, produces a parallel plan of activities
that is translated into SHAMASH and presented graphically to the user. The
obtained plan proposes the scheduling of parallel activities that may handle
time and resource constraints. Notice that the emphasis here is on supporting
processes for which one has complete knowledge.
The work [17] is based on learning activities as planning operators and feed-
ing them to a planner that generates the process model. An interesting result
concerns the possibility of producing process models even though the activities
may not be accurately described. In such cases, the authors use a best-effort
planner that is always able to create a plan, even though the plan may be incor-
rect. By refining the preconditions and effects of planning actions, the planner
will be able to produce several candidate plans, and after a finite number of
refinements, the best candidate plan (i.e., the one with the lowest number of
unsatisfied preconditions) is translated into a process model.
In the SEMPA approach [18], process actions are semantically described by
specifying their input/output parameters with respect to an ontology imple-
mented in OWL. Starting from such a knowledge, planning is used to derive
an action state graph (ASG) consisting of those actions whose execution leads
to a given goal from a pre-specified initial state. Then, a process model repre-
sented as an UML activity diagram is extracted from the ASG by identifying
What Automated Planning Can Do for BPM 13

the required control flow for the process. Interestingly, the planning algorithm
implemented in SEMPA provides the ability to build the ASG in presence of
initial state uncertainty and with different conflicting goals.
The works [19,20] refer to a technique based on partial-order planning algo-
rithms and declarative specifications of process activities in PDDL for synthe-
sizing a library of process templates to be enacted in contextual scenarios. The
resulting templates guarantee that concurrent activities of a process template
are effectively independent one from another (i.e., they cannot affect the same
data) and are reusable in a variety of partially specified contextual environments.
A key characteristic of this approach is the role of contextual data acting as a
driver for process templates generation.

3.2 Planning for Process Adaptation

Process Adaptation is the ability of a process to react to exceptional circum-


stances (that may or may not be foreseen) and to adapt/modify its structure
accordingly [6]. Exceptions can be either anticipated or unanticipated. An antici-
pated exception can be planned at design-time and incorporated into the process
model, i.e., a (human) process designer can provide an exception handler which is
invoked during run-time to cope with the exception. Conversely, unanticipated
exceptions generally refer to situations, unplanned at design-time, that may
emerge at run-time and can be detected by monitoring discrepancies between
the real-world processes and their computerized representation.
Challenge. In many dynamic application domains (e.g., emergency manage-
ment, smart manufacturing, etc.), the number of possible anticipated exceptions
is often too large, and traditional manual implementation of exception handlers
at design-time is not feasible for process designers, who have to anticipate all
potential problems and ways to overcome them in advance. Furthermore, antic-
ipated exceptions cover only partially relevant situations, as in such scenarios
many unanticipated exceptional circumstances may arise during process exe-
cution. The management of processes in dynamic domains requires that BPM
environments provide real-time monitoring and automated adaptation features
during process execution, in order to achieve the overall objectives of the pro-
cesses still preserving their structure by minimising any human intervention [7].
Application of Planning. The first work dealing with this research challenge
is [21]. It discusses how planning can be interleaved with process execution to
suggest compensation procedures or the re-execution of activities if some antici-
pated failure arises. The work [22] presents an approach for enabling automated
process instance change in case of activity failures occurring at run-time that
lead to a process goal violation. The approach relies on a partial-order planner
for the generation of a new complete process model that complies with the pro-
cess goal. The generated model is substituted at run-time to the original process
that included the failed task.
The above works use planning to tackle anticipated exceptions or to com-
pletely redefine the process model when some activity failure arises. However, in
14 A. Marrella

dynamic domains, it would be desirable to adapt a running process by modifying


only those parts of the process that need to be changed/adapted and keeps other
parts stable, by avoiding to revolutionize the work list of activities assigned to
the process participants [7].
In this direction, the SmartPM approach and system [23,24] provides a
planning-based mechanism that requires no predefined handler to build on-the-
fly the recovery procedure required to adapt a running process instance. Specif-
ically, adaptation in SmartPM can be seen as reducing the gap between the
expected reality, i.e., the (idealized) model of reality that reflects the intended
outcome of the task execution, and the physical reality, i.e., the real world with
the actual values of conditions and outcomes. A recovery procedure is needed
during process execution if the two realities are different from each other. A
misalignment of the two realities often stems from errors in the tasks outcomes
(e.g., incorrect data values) or is the result of exogenous events coming from the
environment. If the gap between the expected and physical realities is such that
the process instance cannot progress, the SmartPM system invokes an exter-
nal planner to build a recovery procedure as a plan, which can thereby resolve
exceptions that were not designed into the original process. Notice that a similar
framework to tackle process adaptation through planning is also adopted in the
research works [25–27].
In SmartPM, the problem of automatically synthesize a recovery procedure
is encoded as a classical planning problem in PDDL. The planning domain con-
sists of propositions that characterize the contextual data describing the process
domain. Planning actions are built from a repository of process activities anno-
tated with preconditions and effects expressed over the process domain. Then,
the initial state reflects the physical reality at the time of the failure, while the
goal state corresponds to the expected reality. A classical planner fed with such
inputs searches for a plan that may turn the physical reality into the expected
reality by adapting the faulty process instance.
A similar adaptation strategy is applied in [28], which proposes a goal-driven
approach for service-based applications to adapt business processes to run-time
context changes. Process models include service annotations describing how ser-
vices contribute to the intended goal. Contextual properties are modeled as state
transition systems capturing possible values and possible evolutions in the case
of precondition violations or external events. Process and context changes that
prevent goal achievement are managed through an adaptation mechanism based
on service composition via planning.
Finally, the work [29] proposes a runtime mechanism that uses dependency
scopes for identifying critical parts of the processes whose correct execution
depends on some shared variables and intervention processes for solving poten-
tial inconsistencies between data. Intervention processes are automatically syn-
thesised through a planner based on CSP techniques. While closely related to
SmartPM, this work requires specification of a (domain-dependent) adaptation
policy, based on volatile variables and when changes to them become relevant.
What Automated Planning Can Do for BPM 15

3.3 Planning for Conformance Checking

Within the discipline of process mining, conformance checking is the problem


of verifying whether the observed behavior stored in an event log is compliant
with the process model that encodes how the process is allowed to be executed to
ensure that norms and regulations are not violated. The notion of alignment [30]
provides a robust approach to conformance checking, which makes it possible
to exactly pinpoint the deviations causing nonconformity with a high degree
of detail. An alignment between a recorded process execution (log trace) and
a process model is a pairwise matching between activities recorded in the log
(events) and activities allowed by the model (process activities).
Challenge. In general, a large number of possible alignments exist between a
process model and a log trace, since there may exist manifold explanations why
a trace is not conforming. It is clear that one is interested in finding the most
probable explanation, i.e., one of the alignments with the least expensive devi-
ations (i.e., optimal alignments), according to some function assigning costs to
deviations. The existing techniques to compute optimal alignments against pro-
cedural [31] and declarative [32] process models provide ad-hoc implementations
of the A* algorithm. The fact is that when process models and event logs are
of considerable size the existing approaches do not scale efficiently due to their
ad-hoc nature and they are unable to accomplish the alignment task. In the era
of Big Data, scalable approaches to process mining are desperately necessary, as
also advocated by the IEEE Task Force in Process Mining [30].
Application of planning. In case of procedural models represented as Petri
Nets, the work [33] proposes an approach and a tool to encode the original
algorithm for trace alignment [31] as a planning problem in PDDL. Specifically,
starting from a Petri net N and an event log L to be aligned, for each log trace
σL ∈ L it is built (i) a planning domain PD , which encodes the propositions
needed to capture the structure of N and to monitor the evolution of its mark-
ing, and three classes of planning actions that represent “alignment” moves:
synchronous moves (associated with no cost), model moves and log moves; and
(ii) a planning problem PR , which includes a number of constants required to
properly ground all the domain propositions in PD ; in this case, constants will
correspond to the place and transition instances involved in N . Then, the initial
state of PR is defined to capture the exact structure of the specific log trace σL
of interest and the initial marking of N , and the goal condition is encoded to
represent the fact that N is in the final marking and σL has been completely
analyzed. At this point, for any trace of the event log, an external planner is
invoked to synthesize a plan to reach the final goal from the initial state, i.e., a
sequence of alignment moves (each of which is a planning action) that establish
an optimal alignment between σL and N .
Relatively close is the work [34] where authors use planners to recover the
missing recording of events in log traces. The concept of missing event recordings
is very similar to model moves in [33]. However, in [34] it is assumed that all
executions are compliant with the model and, hence, every event that is present
Another random document with
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We yield to sympathy what we refuse to description.—
Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful.
STORIES OF EMOTION
Fictional plots deal with the inner man quite as often as with the outer.
Indeed, the action of the soul is more real, intense and interesting
than mere visible action could possibly be. For this reason the master
story-tellers nearly always interpret the inner life—whether of thought,
of emotion, or of decision—by displaying the outer, instead of by
merely analyzing and discussing the thoughts, feelings and decisions
of their characters. The more clearly this outer action pictures the
inner man, the more real does the character become to us and the
more perfectly do we grasp the whole story.
As a universal human experience, emotion[20] mingles with all
manifestations of life. In the short-story it finds various expression in
the hilarious fun of “Pigs is Pigs,” by Butler; the character humor of
Barrie’s “Thrums” stories; the mingled humor and pathos of Harte’s
“The Luck of Roaring Camp”; the patriotic sentiment of Daudet’s “The
Siege of Berlin”; the mystic sympathy of Kipling’s “They”; the idyllic
love of the Book of Ruth; the incomparable psychological insight of
Maupassant’s “A Coward”; the cold, revengeful jealousy of Balzac’s
“La Grande Bretêche”; the choking, supernatural terror of Poe’s “The
Pit and the Pendulum”; the tragic passion of Mérimée’s “Mateo
Falcone,” and all the myriad shades and combinations of shades
which lie between.
Naturally, each story in this entire collection illustrates one or another
emotional phase, as even a cursory reading will make clear. What, for
example, could be more intense than the emotions of those two
parents, as depicted in “The Monkey’s Paw?” But for this group two
stories have been selected as being typical examples of emotional
expression, because in them human feeling predominates over all
other characteristics and really makes the story.
“The Last Class,” which is here presented in a translation by the editor
of this volume, is rich in local color, in impressionism, and in character
drawing, but as an unaffected picture of patriotic feeling it is
unsurpassed in the literature of the short-story. There is not a single
jarring emotional tone, not the slightest exaggeration of true emotional
values. With singular repression, Daudet secures his effects by
suggesting rather than fully expressing the profound feelings of the
school-master, his pupils, and the visitors; and when the majestically
simple climax is reached, we have accepted the reality of it all and
have received a single effective and lasting impression.
“Without Benefit of Clergy,” the second specimen, is left for the reader
to analyze and discuss. Surely this most sadly touching of all love-
stories presents the poignant pity, the inevitable disaster, the final
heart-break of unsanctified love, as never before or since in the pages
of fiction.

DAUDET AND HIS WRITINGS


Alphonse Daudet was born at Nîmes, France, May 13, 1840. Here
and at Lyons he received his education. At the age of seventeen he
and his brother Ernest went to Paris, where Alphonse published his
first long poem two years later. This began his literary success. From
1860 to 1865 he served as secretary in the Cabinet of the Duke de
Morny, and at the early age of twenty-five was decorated with the
Cross of the Legion of Honor. He was profoundly impressed by the
memories of his early life and frequently revisited his native Provence.
The South-of-France tone is distinguishable in much of his work, just
as the powerful feelings called forth by the Franco-Prussian war find
expression in other of his writings. He died in Paris, December 16,
1897.
Alphonse Daudet was a dramatist, poet, novelist, and short-story
writer. The Nabob, Sappho, Jack, Kings in Exile, Numa Roumestan,
Fromont and Risler, The Evangelist, and the “Tartarin” books are his
best known novels. Among his best short-stories are “The Pope’s
Mule,” “The Death of the Dauphin,” “The Three Low Masses,” “The
Elixir of the Reverend Father Gaucher,” “Old Folks,” and “Master
Cornille’s Secret”—all from the collection, Letters from My Mill. The
following little masterpieces are from his Monday Tales: “The Game of
Billiards,” “The Child Spy,” “The Little Pies,” “Mothers,” “The Siege of
Berlin,” and “The Last Class.”
At the close of the Franco-Prussian war, in 1871, France was forced to
cede to Germany almost all of Alsace, about nine thousand square
miles of territory, in addition to an indemnity of one billion dollars. “The
Last Class” was held, therefore, about 1872, and the story was first
published in 1873.

Daudet’s literary genius sounded every note, from farce, delicate


humor, and satire, to poetic pathos, dramatic action, character
analysis, and social criticism. He resembled Dickens in his humor, but
displayed more emotional tenderness, and, in his later work, more
satire, than did the English writer. Though he may be called the literary
descendant of Balzac, whose novels systematically depicted French
society in all its phases, Daudet was less a social philosopher and
more a man expressing his own personality through his work.
Comparing him with Maupassant, we find his stories less perfect in
form, but far richer in human feeling. Though at times he dealt with
subjects which English readers consider broad, his sympathy
unmistakably appears to be with his nobler characters.
When only ten years of age, I was already haunted at times
by the desire to lose my own personality, and incarnate
myself in other beings; the mania was already laying hold of
me for observing and analyzing, and my chief amusement
during my walks was to pick out some passerby, and to
follow him all over Lyons, through all his idle strollings or
busy occupations, striving to identify myself with his life,
and to enter into his innermost thoughts.—Alphonse
Daudet, Thirty Years of Paris.
Daudet expresses many things; but he most frequently
expresses himself—his own temper in the presence of life,
his own feeling on a thousand occasions.—Henry James,
Partial Portraits.
Life, as he knows it, is sad, full of disappointment,
bitterness, and suffering; and yet the conclusion he draws
from experience is that this life, with all its sadness, is well
worth living.—René Doumic, Contemporary French
Novelists.
The short stories are Daudet at his best, a style tense,
virile, full of suppressed energy.... There is a nobler strain in
these stories than speaks from the pages of Le Petit Chose
[“Little What’s-His-Name”],—the ring of passionate
patriotism, no longer the voice of Provence, or of Paris, but
the voice of France.... The touching story, La Dernière
Classe, might have come from the lips of an Alsatian, so
true is it to the spirit of Alsace during those sorrowful days
that followed the Franco-Prussian War.—Marion
McIntyre, Introduction to Works.
Daudet’s two main series of stories (Letters from My Mill
and Monday Tales) contain between sixty and seventy
pieces.... They represent Daudet the poet, with his exquisite
fancy, his winning charm, his subtle, indescribable style, his
susceptibility to all that is lovely and joyous in nature and in
human life; in short, in his sunny, mercurial Provençal
temperament.... But there was another Daudet more or less
superimposed upon this sunny, poetic Daudet, true child of
Provence. Upon few Frenchmen of a generation ago did
the terrible years of the Franco-Prussian War and the
Commune produce a more sobering impression. The
romanticist and poet deepened into a realistic observer of
human life in all its phases.—W. P. Trent, Introduction to
the volume on Daudet, in Little French Masterpieces.
The charm reflected in his works lay in the man himself,
and earned for him a host of friends and an unclouded
domestic life—it lay in his open, sunny, inconsequent,
southern nature, with his quick sympathies, his irony at
once forcible and delicate, his ready tears. It lay in the
spontaneousness of his talent, in his Provençal gift of
improvisation.... And it lay, too, in what was an essential
characteristic of his nature, his rapid alternation of mood.
Take even the slightest of his Contes [stories].... Within a
few pages he is in turn sad, gay, sentimental, ironical,
pathetic, and one mood glides into the next without jar or
friction.—V. M. Crawford, Studies in Foreign Literature.
His stories first of all amuse, excite, distress himself.... He
never could, indeed, look on them disinterestedly, either
while they were making or when they were made. He made
them with actual tears and laughter; and they are read with
actual tears and laughter by the crowd.... But he had no
philosophy behind his fantastic and yet only too probable
creations. Caring, as he thought, supremely for life, he
cared really for that surprising, bewildering pantomime
which life seems to be to those who watch its coloured
movement, its flickering lights, its changing costumes, its
powdered faces, without looking through the eyes into the
hearts of the dancers. He wrote from the very midst of the
human comedy; and it is from this that he seems at times to
have caught the bodily warmth and the taste of the tears
and the very ring of the laughter of men and women....—
Arthur Symons, Studies in Prose and Verse.

FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON


DAUDET
Chats about Books, Mayo W. Hazeltine (1883); French Fiction of To-
day, M. S. Van de Velde (1891); Alphonse Daudet; a Biographical and
Critical Study, R. H. Sherard (1894); The Literary Movement in
France, Georges Pellissier (1897); Literary Likings, Richard Burton
(1898); The Historical Novel, Brander Matthews (1901); French
Profiles, Edmund W. Gosse (1905); Short-Story Masterpieces, J. Berg
Esenwein (1912).

THE LAST CLASS


(La Dernière Classe)
The Story of a Little Alsatian
BY ALPHONSE DAUDET
Translation by The Editor
That morning I was very late for school, so I Introduction
was terribly afraid of a scolding—particularly plunges us at once
since Master Hamel had said that he would into the action.
There is one main
examine us on participles, and I knew not the incident throughout.
first word about them! For a little while I The narrator is
thought of playing truant and wandering the immediately seen to
be a child, and
fields. surmised to be a
boy.
2. The day was so warm, so clear!
3. I could hear the blackbirds whistling on the Setting. Note how
border of the wood; and back of the sawmill, the rural community
in the Rippert field, the Prussian soldiers is suggested.
were drilling. All of this was much more
tempting to me than participial rules—but I was strong enough
to resist and away to school I ran, as fast as I could.
4. As I passed by the mayor’s office, I Small municipalities
observed that a number of people were have mayors, in
assembled before the little board on which France.
notices were generally posted. For two years
every piece of bad news had come from that The tone is struck
board—defeats in battle, conscriptions, here. Forecast of
orders from headquarters—and, without crisis.
stopping, I wondered:
Franco-Prussian
5. “What can it be this time!” War.

6. Just then, as I was running across the Forecasts a crisis.


square, Wachter the blacksmith, who with his
apprentice stood reading the placard, called Note the Prussian
after me: name. Alsace was a
border province.
7. “You needn’t hurry so fast, my lad, you’ll
get to school soon enough!” Hint of crisis to
come.
8. I thought he was making game of me, and Contributory
Incident.
I kept right on, reaching Master Hamel’s little
yard quite out of breath. The school was held
in the master’s
9. Ordinarily, as school was opening, the house.
uproar was so great that it could be heard
clear out on the street—desk-lids opening Unusual air depicted
by contrast.
and shutting, lessons droned aloud in unison, The story proper
pupils holding their ears shut to learn their begins.
lessons easier, while the master’s great
ferrule beat upon the desks: An old custom.

10. “A little quietness!”


11. I had counted on all this noise to enable Contrast.
me to reach my seat unnoticed; but on that
particular day everything was as quiet as a Sabbath morning.
Through the open window I saw my schoolmates already
ranged in their places, and Master Hamel pacing to and fro, his
formidable iron ferrule under his arm. In the midst of that
complete silence I had to open the door and go in! You can well
imagine whether I blushed and was afraid!
12. But, quite to the contrary, Master Hamel Contrast.
looked at me with no sign of anger, and then
very gently said:
13. “Go directly to your seat, my little Frantz Evidently a small
—we were about to begin without you.” school.

14. Immediately I stepped over the bench and sat down at my


desk. Only then, when I had partly gotten At which others were
over my fright, did I observe that our master also seated.
was wearing his handsome blue riding-coat,
his plaited ruff, and his black silk embroidered breeches—worn
only on inspection days or when prizes were awarded.
Furthermore, there was something All the contrasts
extraordinary, something solemn, about the prepare us for the
whole school. But what astounded me more crisis.
than anything else was to see a number of
people from the village sitting, as silent as we, on the usually
empty benches at the back of the room: old Father Hauser with
his three-cornered hat, the ex-mayor, the Prussian name.
former postman, besides a number of others.
All seemed cast down, and Father Hauser had brought with
him an old primer, with chewed up leaves, Dazed.
which he held wide-open up-side-down on
his knees, and lying on it his huge spectacles.
15. While I was marvelling at all this, Master Hamel had
mounted his platform, and in the same gentle and serious
voice with which he had greeted me, he said to us:
16. “My children, this is the last day that I Foundation of
shall keep school. The order has come from Climax. Summary of
Berlin that nothing but German shall be the theme. Compare
with Longfellow’s
taught in the schools of Alsace and Lorraine. Evangeline.
The new school-master will arrive to-morrow.
This is the last class in French—I beg of you This law went into
to be very attentive!” effect July 1, 1870.

17. His simple words overwhelmed me. This, then, was the
notice they had posted at the mayor’s office. Oh, the
scoundrels!
18. My last lesson in French! The crisis becomes
personal.
19. And I was scarcely able to write! Then I
was never to learn! I must stop short just where I was! How
angry with myself it made me to remember Scarcely a
the time I had frittered away, and the lessons paragraph but
I had missed while hunting birds’ nests or appeals to emotion
sliding on the Saar! My books now seemed to in some form.
me like old comrades from whom it broke my heart to part, and
only a moment since I had found them—my The Saar flows
grammar, my sacred history—so dull, and so northward into the
heavy to carry! It was just the same when I Moselle.
thought of Master Hamel. He was going
away. I should never see him again—the thought made me
forget all his punishments and strokes with the ferrule.
20. Poor old man! So it was in honor of that Shift to interest in
last lesson in French that he had donned his the Master.
Sunday best—and now I understood why
those old folks from the village were seated at the back of the
room. It seemed to say they regretted that Now to the villagers.
they had not visited the school oftener.
Besides, it was a sort of way of thanking our Age indicated, thus
teacher for his forty years of devoted service, adding to the pathos.
and of showing their love for the fatherland
which was passing away. These are the key
words.
21. Just at this point in my reflections I heard
my name called—it was my turn to recite. Oh, Note how Daudet
arouses our
I would have given anything to be able to sympathies by
recite without a slip, in a strong, clear voice, avoiding generalities
that celebrated rule about participles; but at and centering our
interest upon
the very first words I grew confused and I persons.
only stood there at my bench swaying back
and forward, my heart swelling, not daring to lift my head. At
length I heard Master Hamel saying to me:
22. “My little Frantz, I shall not scold you; you Ordinary rebuke is
are punished enough, I think. It is so with all swallowed up in the
of us; every day we reassure ourselves: ‘Bah! great common
I have plenty of time. To-morrow I shall learn.’ sorrow.
Then you see what happens. Alas! it has ever been the great
misfortune of our Alsace to defer its lessons until the morrow.
And now these people are justified in saying Daudet here teaches
to us, ‘What, you pretend to be French, and all France a lesson
you are able neither to speak nor to write —and all nations as
your language!’ But in all this you are not the well.
most guilty one, my poor Frantz—we are all worthy of a full
measure of self-reproach.
23. “Your parents have not taken enough Note M. Hamel’s
care to see that you got an education. They simple sincerity.
preferred to save a few more sous by putting
you to work in the fields or in the factories. And I—have I
nothing for which to blame myself? Have I not frequently sent
you to water my garden instead of keeping you at your books?
Or have I ever hesitated to dismiss school when I wanted to go
trout-fishing?”
24. So Master Hamel, passing from one theme to another,
began to speak to us about our French language. He said that
it was the most beautiful language in the whole world—the
most clear, the most substantial; that we must ever cherish it
among ourselves, and never forget it, for when a nation falls
into bondage, just so long as it clings to its language, it holds
the key of its prison.[21]
25. Then he took a grammar and read us our The attention follows
lesson. I was astonished to see how readily I the lead of the
understood! Everything he said seemed to emotions.
me so easy—so very easy. I believe that
never before had I listened so attentively, and that he, in turn,
had never explained things with such infinite So does the
patience. It almost seemed as though the teacher’s skill.
poor fellow wished to impart all his
knowledge to us before he left us—to drive it all into our heads
with one blow.
26. The lesson ended, we went on to the exercises in
penmanship. For that day Master Hamel had gotten ready
some entirely new copies on which he had written in a neat,
round hand: “France, Alsace, France, Alsace.” The slips of
paper looked like tiny flags, waving all about A proof of unusual
the room and hanging from the rods of our absorption.
desks. You should have seen how diligently
everyone worked, and how quiet it was! Only the scratching of
the pens over the paper could be heard. Once some beetles
flew in, but nobody paid any attention to them—not even the
very smallest chaps, who were struggling to draw their oblique
lines with a will and an application as sincere as though even
the lines themselves were French.... Pigeons Note the pathos of
cooed in low tones on the roof of the the appeal.
schoolhouse, and as I listened to them I
thought to myself:
27. “I wonder if they are going to make them coo in German
too!”
28. Now and then, as I lifted my eyes from A picture. All of
my task, I saw Master Hamel seated these contributory
motionless in his chair, and staring at things pictures stand in lieu
of contributory
about him as though in that look he would incidents. The whole
carry away with him the whole of his little is highly unified.
schoolhouse. Think of it! For forty years he
had occupied that same place, his yard in front of him, and his
school always unchanged. Only the benches and desks were
rubbed by use until they were polished; the walnuts in the yard
had grown large, and the hop-vine he himself had planted now
hung in festoons from the windows clear to The lad reasons as a
the roof. How heartbreaking it must have lad—to him the
been for that poor man to leave all this—to pathos is not for
hear his sister moving to and fro in the room himself
old man.
but for the

overhead as she packed their trunks! Next


day they were going away—to leave the fatherland forever.
29. All the same, he had the courage to keep the school to the
very closing minute. The writing over, we had our lesson in
history. Then the little ones sang in unison their ba, be, bi, bo,
bu. Yonder, at the back of the room, old Father Hauser was
holding his spelling-book with both hands, and with the aid of
his great spectacles he spelled out the letters—one could see
that even he too was applying himself. Emotion shook his
voice, and to hear him was so droll that we all wanted to laugh
—and to cry. Ah! I shall always remember that last class.
30. Suddenly the church clock sounded Preparation for
twelve. Then the Angelus. At the same Climax.
instant were heard under our very windows Formal Crisis—the
end approaches.
the trumpets of the Prussians returning from Note the force of
drill. Pale as death, Master Hamel rose from this.
his chair. Never had he seemed so large. Moral qualities affect
the physical.
31. “My friends,” he began; “my friends, I—I
—”
32. But something choked him. He could not end the sentence.
33. Then he turned to the blackboard, seized
a piece of chalk, and, bearing with all his Note the intensity.
strength, he wrote in the largest letters he could make:
34. “VIVE LA FRANCE!” Full Climax.
35. Then he stood there, his head leaning
against the wall, and without a word he signed to us with his
hand:
36. “It is the end ... go!”

KIPLING AND HIS WRITINGS


Joseph Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay, India, December 30,
1865, of English parents, his father, J. Lockwood Kipling, an artist of
ability, having been in the colonial Civil Service. He was educated at
the United Services College, Devon, but returned to India in 1882 and
became an editorial writer and correspondent. In 1889 he began
extensive travels. For several years he resided in Brattleboro,
Vermont, but returned to England and settled in Rottingdean, Sussex.
Rudyard Kipling has attained celebrity as poet, novelist, and short-
story writer. His best-known poems are found in the collections entitled
Departmental Ditties, Barrack-Room Ballads, The Seven Seas, and
The Five Nations. Kim is his ablest novel. The two “Jungle Books”
constitute a remarkable collection of connected tales of the jungle folk.
His best short-stories are found in the following volumes: Soldiers
Three (the “Mulvaney” stories, “The Man Who Was,” etc.), The
Phantom Rickshaw (“The Man Who Would be King,” “The Strange
Ride of Morrowbie Jukes,” etc.), Wee Willie Winkie and Other Stories
(“The Drums of the Fore and Aft,” “Under the Deodars,” etc.), The
Day’s Work (“The Bridge Builders,” “The Brushwood Boy,” etc.), and
Traffic and Discoveries (“They,” etc.). “Without Benefit of Clergy” first
appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine (London) in June, 1890, and in the
June 7th and 14th, 1890, numbers of Harper’s Weekly (New York). In
the same year it was published in the volume, The Courting of Dinah
Shadd, and Other Stories, but in 1891 it was included in the volume
Life’s Handicap: being Stories of Mine Own People.

Rudyard Kipling is without doubt the greatest of living short-story


writers, though in interest his later fiction does not equal his
productions of the early nineties. His journalistic work drilled him in
compression; his precocious intuitions and personal experience of life
in India opened up a fresh and fascinating field; his genius taught him
how to tell his stories with unfailing variety, a robust humor, and an
understanding of the human heart quite uncanny in one so young. In
style, he is a master of the unexpected; in narration, he is by turns
deliberate and swift; in atmospheric painting, he transports us to real
places, wherein real folk do real things.

Tell them first of those things that thou hast seen and they
have seen together. Thus their knowledge will piece out thy
imperfections. Tell them of what thou alone hast seen, then
what thou hast heard, and since they be children tell them
of battles and kings, horses, devils, elephants, and angels,
but omit not to tell them of love and such like. All the earth
is full of tales to him who listens and does not drive away
the poor from his door. The poor are the best of tale-tellers;
for they must lay their ear to the ground every night.—
Rudyard Kipling, Preface to Life’s Handicap.
The tremulous passion of Ameera, her hopes, her fears,
and her agonies of disappointment, combine to form by far
the most tender page which Mr. Kipling has written.—
Edmund Gosse, Questions at Issue.
... The truly appreciative reader should surely have no
quarrel with the primitive element in Mr. Kipling’s subject-
matter, or with what, for want of a better name, I may call
his love of low life. What is that but essentially a part of his
freshness? And for what part of his freshness are we
exactly more thankful than for just this smart jostle that he
gives the old stupid superstition that the amiability of a
story-teller is the amiability of the people he represents—
that their vulgarity, or depravity, or gentility, or fatuity are
tantamount to the same qualities in the painter himself?—
Henry James, Introduction to Works.
It was not until “Without Benefit of Clergy” that he came to
his full strength in pathetic prose. The history of Ameera is
one of the triumphs of the short story. Its characterization is
vivid; its progress direct and poignant. I do not wish even
for an instant to seem to cheapen one of the most touching
and beautiful stories in the world when I call it journalism.
But the voice of the desolate mother breaking into the
nursery rime of the wicked crow,
“And the wild plums grow in the jungle, only a penny a pound,
Only a penny a pound, baba—only—,”

and every pathetic moment, is chosen by an inspired sense


for what would most feelingly grasp the interest of the
reader. This is high art, with intense feeling behind it—
otherwise it would not be so excellent. But it is also good
journalism.—Henry Seidel Canby, The Short-Story in
English.
For Mr. Kipling to write a story without some firm human
touch, however slight, would be impossible.... In his effects
Mr. Kipling is usually photographic (“cinematographic” is
better), but his methods are almost invariably, for want of a
better word, “artistic.” I mean that whereas the principle of
selection, which is a vital principle of art, can operate but
little in photography, it is seen to be remarkably active in all
Mr. Kipling’s best work. His stories, so to speak, represent
the epigram of action, the epigram of a given situation.... It
is from the lives of such Englishmen ... that Mr. Kipling has
gathered so many of his vivid anecdotes. A great number of
them ... are the lesser lights and darks contributing to such
more serious elements of the general picture as “At the End
of the Passage,” “Without Benefit of Clergy,” “In Flood
Time,” “The Man Who Was,” behind which looms vast in the
background the image of that old Sphinx of the Plains
complete in mystery as no other writer has ever been able
to suggest her.... Also he had written at least one love-story
(“Without Benefit of Clergy”) that broke one’s heart.... For all
the humour and buoyancy of his writings, Mr. Kipling is at
heart a pessimist, and, perhaps, his sincerest expression of
opinion in regard to the government of the universe is
contained in the fierce Omarian exclamation of Holden in
“Without Benefit of Clergy,” addressed to no one in
particular, but evidently meant to reach far up into the skies:
“O you brute! You utter brute!” So Omar bade Allah “man’s
forgiveness give and take.”—Richard Le Gallienne,
Rudyard Kipling: A Criticism.

FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON


KIPLING
Essays in Little, Andrew Lang (1894); Cervantes, Zola, Kipling & Co.,
in Aspects of Modern Fiction, Brander Matthews (1896); My
Contemporaries in Fiction, J. D. C. Murray (1897); A Ken of Kipling,
Will M. Clemens (1899); Victorian Novelists, James Oliphant (1899); A
Kipling Primer, F. L. Knowles (1899); The Religion of Mr. Kipling, W. B.
Parker (1899); Rudyard Kipling, A Biographical Sketch, C. E. Norton
(1899).

FOR ANALYSIS

WITHOUT BENEFIT OF CLERGY


BY RUDYARD KIPLING
Before my Spring I garnered Autumn’s gain,
Out of her time my field was white with grain,
The year gave up her secrets to my woe.
Forced and deflowered each sick season lay,
In mystery of increase and decay;
I saw the sunset ere men saw the day,
Who am too wise in that I should not know.
Bitter Waters.

I
“But if it be a girl?”
2. “Lord of my life, it cannot be. I have prayed for so many
nights, and sent gifts to Sheikh Badl’s shrine so often, that I
know God will give us a son—a man-child that shall grow into a
man. Think of this and be glad. My mother shall be his mother
till I can take him again, and the mullah of the Pattan mosque
shall cast his nativity—God send he be born in an auspicious
hour!—and then, thou wilt never weary of me, thy slave.”
3. “Since when hast thou been a slave, my queen?”
4. “Since the beginning—till this mercy came to me. How could
I be sure of thy love when I knew that I had been bought with
silver?”
5. “Nay, that was the dowry. I paid it to thy mother.”
6. “And she has buried it, and sits upon it all day long like a
hen. What talk is yours of dower! I was bought as though I had
been a Lucknow dancing-girl instead of a child.”
7. “Art thou sorry for the sale?”
8. “I have sorrowed; but to-day I am glad. Thou wilt never
cease to love me now?—answer, my king.”
9. “Never—never. No.”
10. “Not even though the mem-log—the white women of thy
own blood—love thee? And remember, I have watched them
driving in the evening; they are very fair.”
11. “I have seen fire-balloons by the hundred. I have seen the
moon, and—then I saw no more fire-balloons.”
12. Ameera clapped her hands and laughed. “Very good talk,”
she said. Then with an assumption of great stateliness: “It is
enough. Thou hast my permission to depart—if thou wilt.”
13. The man did not move. He was sitting on a low red-
lacquered couch in a room furnished only with a blue and white
floor-cloth, some rugs, and a very complete collection of native
cushions. At his feet sat a woman of sixteen, and she was all
but all the world in his eyes. By every rule and law she should
have been otherwise, for he was an Englishman, and she a
Mussulman’s daughter bought two years before from her
mother, who, being left without money, would have sold
Ameera shrieking to the Prince of Darkness if the price had
been sufficient.
14. It was a contract entered into with a light heart; but even
before the girl had reached her bloom she came to fill the
greater portion of John Holden’s life. For her, and the withered
hag, her mother, he had taken a little house overlooking the
great red-walled city, and found—when the marigolds had
sprung up by the well in the courtyard and Ameera had
established herself according to her own ideas of comfort, and
her mother had ceased grumbling at the inadequacy of the
cooking-places, the distance from the daily market, and at
matters of housekeeping in general—that the house was to him
his home. Any one could enter his bachelor’s bungalow by day
or night, and the life that he led there was an unlovely one. In
the house in the city his feet only could pass beyond the outer
courtyard to the women’s rooms; and when the big wooden
gate was bolted behind him he was king in his own territory,
with Ameera for queen. And there was going to be added to
this kingdom a third person whose arrival Holden felt inclined to
resent. It interfered with his perfect happiness. It disarranged
the orderly peace of the house that was his own. But Ameera
was wild with delight at the thought of it, and her mother not
less so. The love of a man, and particularly a white man, was
at the best an inconstant affair, but it might, both women
argued, be held fast by a baby’s hands. “And then,” Ameera
would always say, “then he will never care for the white mem-
log. I hate them all—I hate them all.”
15. “He will go back to his own people in time,” said the
mother; “but by the blessing of God that time is yet afar off.”
16. Holden sat silent on the couch thinking of the future, and
his thoughts were not pleasant. The drawbacks of a double life
are manifold. The Government, with singular care, had ordered
him out of the station for a fortnight on special duty in the place
of a man who was watching by the bedside of a sick wife. The
verbal notification of the transfer had been edged by a cheerful
remark that Holden ought to think himself lucky in being a
bachelor and a free man. He came to break the news to
Ameera.
17. “It is not good,” she said slowly, “but it is not all bad. There
is my mother here, and no harm will come to me—unless
indeed I die of pure joy. Go thou to thy work and think no
troublesome thoughts. When the days are done I believe ...
nay, I am sure. And—and then I shall lay him in thy arms, and
thou wilt love me forever. The train goes to-night, at midnight is
it not? Go now, and do not let thy heart be heavy by cause of
me. But thou wilt not delay in returning? Thou wilt not stay on
the road to talk to the bold white mem-log. Come back to me
swiftly, my life.”
18. As he left the courtyard to reach his horse that was
tethered to the gate-post, Holden spoke to the white-haired old
watchman who guarded the house, and bade him under certain
contingencies despatch the filled-up telegraph-form that
Holden gave him. It was all that could be done, and with the
sensations of a man who has attended his own funeral Holden
went away by the night mail to his exile. Every hour of the day
he dreaded the arrival of the telegram, and every hour of the
night he pictured to himself the death of Ameera. In
consequence his work for the state was not of first-rate quality,
nor was his temper towards his colleagues of the most
amiable. The fortnight ended without a sign from his home,
and, torn to pieces by his anxieties, Holden returned to be
swallowed up for two precious hours by a dinner at the club,
wherein he heard, as a man hears in a swoon, voices telling
him how execrably he had performed the other man’s duties,
and how he had endeared himself to all his associates. Then
he fled on horseback through the night with his heart in his
mouth. There was no answer at first to his blows on the gate,
and he had just wheeled his horse round to kick it in when Pir
Khan appeared with a lantern and held his stirrup.
19. “Has aught occurred?” said Holden.
20. “The news does not come from my mouth, Protector of the
Poor, but—” He held out his shaking hand as befitted the
bearer of good news who is entitled to a reward.
21. Holden hurried through the courtyard. A light burned in the
upper room. His horse neighed in the gateway, and he heard a
shrill little wail that sent all the blood into the apple of his throat.
It was a new voice, but it did not prove that Ameera was alive.
22. “Who is there?” he called up the narrow brick staircase.
23. There was a cry of delight from Ameera, and then the voice
of the mother, tremulous with old age and pride—“We be two
women and—the man—thy—son.”
24. On the threshold of the room Holden stepped on a naked
dagger, that was laid there to avert ill-luck, and it broke at the
hilt under his impatient heel.
25. “God is great!” cooed Ameera in the half-light. “Thou hast
taken his misfortunes on thy head.”
26. “Ay, but how is it with thee, life of my life? Old woman, how
is it with her?”
27. “She has forgotten her sufferings for joy that the child is
born. There is no harm; but speak softly,” said the mother.
28. “It only needed thy presence to make me all well,” said
Ameera. “My king, thou hast been very long away. What gifts
hast thou for me? Ah, ah! It is I that bring gifts this time. Look,

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