Wil van der Aalst - Business Process Configuration in the Cloud

Business Process Configuration in the Cloud: How to Support and Analyze Multi-Tenant Processes?
by Prof.dr.ir. Wil van der Aalst, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e), The Netherlands

Lion’s share of cloud research has been focusing on performance related problems. However, cloud computing will also change the way in which business processes are managed and supported, e.g., more and more organizations will be sharing common processes. In the classical setting, where product software is used, different organizations can make ad-hoc customizations to let the system fit their needs. This is undesirable, especially when multiple organizations share a cloud infrastructure. Configurable process models enable the sharing of common processes among different organizations in a controlled manner. This paper discusses challenges and opportunities related to business process configuration. Causal nets (C-nets) are proposed as a new formalism to deal with these challenges, e.g., merging variants into a configurable model is supported by a simple union operator. C-nets also provide a good representational bias for process mining, i.e., process discovery and conformance checking based on event logs. In the context of cloud computing, we focus on the application of C-nets to cross-organizational process mining.

Prof.dr.ir. Wil van der Aalst is a full professor of Information Systems at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (TU/e). Currently he is also an adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) working within the BPM group there. His research interests include workflow management, process mining, Petri nets, business process management, process modeling, and process analysis. Wil van der Aalst has published more than 130 journal papers, 16 books (as author or editor), 250 refereed conference/workshop publications, and 50 book chapters.

Many of his papers are highly cited (he has an H-index of more than 75 according to Google Scholar, making him the Dutch computer scientist with the highest H-index) and his ideas have influenced researchers, software developers, and standardization committees working on process support. He has been a co-chair of many conferences including the Business Process Management conference, the International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems, the International conference on the Application and Theory of Petri Nets, and the IEEE International Conference on Services Computing. He is also editor/member of the editorial board of several journals, including the Distributed and Parallel Databases, the International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, the International Journal on Enterprise Modelling and Information Systems Architectures, Computers in Industry, Business & Information Systems Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, and Transactions on Petri Nets and Other Models of Concurrency. He is also a member of the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen).

For more information about his work visit: www.workflowpatterns.com, www.workflowcourse.com, www.processmining.org, www.yawl-system.com, www.wvdaalst.com.

Download the Keynote Slides (PDF, 7MB)