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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
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.
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.
2 Workshop Co-organizers
3 Program Committee
Andrea Marrella(B)
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
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.
– 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.
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
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.
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
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—,”
FOR ANALYSIS
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,