Abstract business process monitoring

Abstract

Business process monitoring provides the means to monitor the executing activities of process instance and it allows checking the resulting state of each activity. This information provides users knowledge about which activities have successfully been performed and which ones need to be fixed by an administrator or technical operator. However, modeling and executing of business processes are carried out on different levels of abstraction, i.e., the process model that is designed on high-level by the business users might not be directly executed, but it needs to be either decomposed into several small additional steps or translated into low-level executable codes for example Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) by the technical users, so that the process engine can understand how to execute the business processes. In the end the business users who are interested in viewing the resulting business process instance can only have a low-level view, i.e., the status of the high-level view is unknown. In this student thesis business processes based on the language BPEL will be used in the low-level view, while the high-level process model is proposed and realized as Chevron-like processes (used in Microsoft PowerPoint). The Chevron process model might be defined by tagging some useful information such as name and picture to each activity to reflect the business purposes, and also small indicator for the activity status. The problem described above can be dealt with the assistance of process views [Schumm2] and state propagation patterns [Schumm3]. Process views allow given process model to be customized, e.g., by removing a particular activity or by augmenting additional information to activities which can be used during visualization. In business process monitoring, process views enable the mapping between activities on different levels of abstraction and they also visualize the current state of running activity instances. State propagation patterns [Schumm3] define how states of low-level view can be projected into the high-level view. The resulting states of activities from the BPEL business process should be propagated back into the activities of Chevron process. Some basic patterns will be presented and each of them contributes a solution to a particular case. At the end an example scenario is introduced and a test of the projection from low-level model into high-level model will be conducted.