About DEC2H
Workshop Theme
Processes and business process models involve rules and decisions describing the premises and possible outcomes of specific situations. However, rules and decisions are often implicit in process flows, process activities or in the head of employees (tacit knowledge). To make them explicit, they must be discovered using state-of-art techniques. For knowledge-intensive processes, it is common that rules and decisions, as opposed to the process-flow, define the allowed behaviour of a process. For example, the major purpose of an insurance claim process is to ensure that the rules governing the claim are being followed and to arrive at a final decision.
In particular, Knowledge-intensive Processes (KiPs) rely on such rules and decisions to guide the workflows of all process stakeholders. Examples include checking creditworthiness in a financial process, claim acceptance in an insurance process, eligibility decisions in social security, etc. These are highly variable situations, and the processes supporting them are very flexible by nature. This variability and flexibility calls for explicit statement of the underlying rules and decisions when describing such processes.
While traditional imperative notations such as BPMN excel at describing “happy paths”, they are inadequate for modelling rules and decisions. This follows from the fact that imperative notations describe possible behaviour as alternative, restricted flows. Encompassing all possible variations makes imperative models cluttered and thus impractical in highly flexible scenarios. Against this background, a new declarative modelling paradigm has been proposed that aims to directly capture the business rules or constraints underlying the process. The approach has gained momentum, and in recent years several declarative notations have emerged, such as Declare, DCR Graphs, DMN, CMMN, GSM, eCRG, and DPIL.
In this workshop, we are interested in the application and challenges of decision- and rule-based modelling in all phases of the BPM lifecycle: identification, discovery, analysis, redesign, implementation and monitoring. Contributions may include completed work (research, case studies and tools), but also work-in-progress and position papers.
Purpose of the workshop
The purpose of the workshop is:
- To examine the relationship between rules, decisions and processes, including models; not only to model the process, but also to model the rules and decisions.
- To enhance rule and decision mining based on process data (e.g., event logs).
- To examine decision goals, structures, and their connection with business processes, in order to find a good integration between rule- and decision-based modelling and flow-based modelling.
- To examine standards (DMN, CMMN, BPMN) and their integration.
- To study how different process models can be designed to fit a decision process, according to various optimization criteria, such as throughput time, use of resources, etc.
- To study the integration between declarative models with traditional imperative models.
- To show best practices in separating process, rule and decision concerns.
Topics
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Declarative and hybrid (process modelling) approaches
- Declarative notations (Declare, DCR Graphs, CMMN, GSM, eCRG, DPIL, …)
- Decision & goal notations (DMN, PDM, …)
- Declarative and hybrid modelling methodologies
- Process metrics
- Process maintenance and flexibility
- Human-centered and flexible processes
- Decision rules and processes
- Decision models and structures
- Formal analysis (e.g., expressiveness proofs) of declarative and hybrid notations
- Formal verification (e.g. model-checking and static analysis) of declarative and hybrid models
- Run-time adaptation of declarative and hybrid process models
Decision mining and declarative/hybrid process mining
- Decision mining
- Declarative process mining
- Hybrid process mining
- Data mining for decision and declarative/hybrid process analysis
- Rule mining for decision and declarative/hybrid process analysis
- Modeling challenges to combine static information of business
Applications of decision- and rule-modelling in BPM
- Goal-driven processes
- Knowledge-intensive processes
- Business process compliance
- Knowledge workflow management
- Usability and understandability studies
- Case studies
- Tools