DEC2H 2019

7th International Workshop on DEClarative, DECision and Hybrid approaches to processes (DEC2H 2019) In conjunction with BPM 2019

Workshop: , Vienna, Austria

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.

Download the Call for 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

Paper submission

Submission guidelines

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers on any of the topics of the workshop. We are interested in research, work-in-progress, position, case-study and tool papers, either in long (not exceeding 12 pages) or short (not exceeding 6 pages) format. Only papers in English will be considered. Submitted papers must present original research contributions not concurrently submitted elsewhere.

Submissions must be prepared according to the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) format specified by Springer (see instructions). The title page must contain a short abstract and a list of keywords, preferably using the list of topics given above. Papers must be submitted electronically via EasyChair: enter the main conference installation (BPM 2019) and select “(Workshop on DEClarative, DECision and Hybrid approaches to processes)” as the submission track.

At least one author of each accepted manuscript must register for the workshop and present the paper. Registration is subject to the terms, conditions and procedure of the main BPM 2019 conference to be found on its website.

Submission categories

At the moment of the submission, the portal will ask the authors to specify one of the following contribution categories:

Research paper
Papers reporting on the results of original research.
Work-in-progress / position paper
Papers reporting on significant intermediate results that would benefit from discussion in the community, though not complete yet. Position papers propose new ideas which have yet to be investigated (e.g., making a convincing case for a significant new hypothesis), or a new research agenda for a field relevant to the workshop.
Tool paper
Papers describing new software tools relevant to the workshop. Authors are encouraged to include significant technical details.

Papers reporting on the use of existing technologies in an organizational setting (case study papers) are also welcome. Depending on the maturity of the study, they could be submitted as research papers or work-in-progress papers.

Each manuscript will be reviewed by at least three program committee members guaranteeing that only papers presenting high quality work and innovative research in areas relevant to the workshop theme will be accepted. All accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings. The pre-prints will be made available before the workshop starts. The post-proceedings will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) series, in a single volume dedicated to the proceedings of all BPM 2019 workshops. During a time window after the conference the workshop participants will be granted the free download of the papers.

Download the Call for Papers

Special Issue

Depending on their quality, the authors of selected papers in DEC2H will be invited to submit revised and extended versions of their work for a special issue in the Journal on Data Semantics (JoDS), edited by Springer. The special issue is organised together with the chairs of the Workshop on Process Querying (PQ), held in conjunction with BPM 2019.

Important dates

Abstract submission

AoE

Manuscript submission

AoE [extended]

Notification

Camera-ready version

Workshop


Read the programme of the workshop

Register

Programme

Format

The workshop will begin with a keynote, followed by presentations of accepted papers. Full papers have 20 minutes for their presentations plus 5 minutes for discussion and Q&A. Short papers have 15 minutes for their presentations plus 5 minutes for discussion and Q&A.

Keynote

Marco Montali, Putting Decisions in Perspective(s)

Abstract

The advent of the OMG standardization effort on the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) has revived interest, both from academia and industry, in decision management and its relationship with business process management. From the technical point of view, many analysis tasks to check for correctness, refactor, and optimize decision models are now being studied by exploiting the specific modeling choices adopted by the standard. In particular, the S-FEEL DMN language provides an interesting trade-off between expressiveness and computational tractability. In this short paper, I argue that decisions have to be put in perspective, that is, understood and analyzed not in isolation, but in a concrete organizational context. I consequently show how even more challenging analysis tasks arise in this case. Specifically, using a simple but illustrative example, two concrete perspectives are considered: background, structural knowledge of the domain of interest, and (data-aware) business processes routing cases based on decisions. I report on how we successfully tackled decision analysis tasks in both settings, through a balanced combination of conceptual modeling, formal methods, and knowledge representation and reasoning.

The keynote speaker

Marco Montali an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. He received a MEng cum laude in Computer Science Engineering in 2005 and a PhD in Electronics, Computer Science and Telecommunications Engineering in 2009. He devises techniques grounded in artificial intelligence, formal methods, knowledge representation and reasoning, for the intelligent management of dynamic systems operating over data, with particular emphasis on business processes and multiagent systems. On these topics, he authored a Springer monograph and more than 150 papers, appeared in top-tier, international journals, conferences, and workshops, such as ACM Trans. On the Web, ACM Trans. on Intelligent Systems and Technology, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, Formal Aspects of Computing, Information&Computation, Information Systems, PODS, IJCAI, AAAI, KR, AAMAS, ECAI, BPM, CIKM, ICSOC, CAiSE. His PhD dissertation received the 2007-2009 “Marco Cadoli” Distinguished Dissertation Award, given by the Italian Association for Logic Programming to the most outstanding Italian thesis focused on computational logic. In 2015, he received the “Marco Somalvico” 2015 Prize from the Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence. He is also recipient of six best paper awards, two of which at the BPM conference. Marco Montali is Director of the Master Degree Course in Computational Data Science, Faculty of Computer Science, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, where he also teaches an advanced course on Data and Process Modelling. He served as Program Chair for the Foundation Track at BPM 2018, and will serve as PC Co-Chair for the 2nd International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM 2020).

Timetable

Time Event
Welcome and opening
Slides
Keynote: Marco Montali, Putting Decisions in Perspective(s)
Slides
Álvaro Valencia Parra, Luisa Parody, Angel Jesus Varela Vaca, Ismael Caballero and Maria Teresa Gómez López, DMN for Data Quality Measurement and Assessment
Coffee break
Erik Smit and Rik Eshuis, Modeling Rolling Stock Maintenance Logistics at Dutch Railways with Declarative Business Artifacts
Antonio Manuel Gutierrez, Freddie Van Rijswijk, Christoph Ruhsam, Ivan Kofrak, Klaus Kogler, Anna Shadrina and Gerhard Zucker, Applying Business Architecture Principles with Domain Specific Ontology to ACM modelling of Building Construction Projects
Adrian Holfter, Stephan Haarmann, Luise Pufahl and Mathias Weske, Checking Compliance in Data-Driven Case Management
Closing
Slides

Further information about the whole programme of the main conference and its workshops can be found in the BPM 2019 dedicated page.

Location

Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna), Room TC.3.08
Welthandelsplatz 1
1020 Vienna
Austria
Open the map

More information on the location can be found in BPM 2019 dedicated page.

People

Program Committee

  • Andrea Burattin, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
  • Josep Carmona, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
  • João Costa Seco, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal
  • Massimiliano de Leoni, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
  • Riccardo De Masellis, Stockholm University, Sweden
  • Johannes De Smedt, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
  • Jochen De Weerdt, KU Leuven, Belgium
  • Rik Eshuis, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
  • Robert Golan, DBmind Technologies Inc., United States
  • María Teresa Gómez-López, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain
  • Xunhua Guo, Tsinghua University, China
  • Thomas Hildebrandt, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
  • Amin Jalali, Stockholm University, Sweden
  • Dimitris Karagiannis, University of Vienna, Austria
  • Krzysztof Kluza, AGH University of Science and Technology, Poland
  • Fabrizio M. Maggi, University of Tartu, Estonia
  • Andrea Marrella, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
  • Jorge Munoz-Gama, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile
  • Hajo A. Reijers, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
  • Stefan Schönig, University of Bayreuth, Germany
  • Lucinéia H. Thom, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
  • Han van der Aa, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
  • Wil M.P. van der Aalst, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
  • Barbara Weber, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
  • Mathias Weske, Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany

Organisers

Contact the chairs at the following email address: DEC2H2019 [at] ai [dot] wu [dot] ac [dot] at