Towards Real-Time Progress Determination of Object-Aware Business Processes

To stay competitive, companies need to continuously improve and evolve their business processes. In this endeavour, business process optimisations and improvements are key elements. In particular, the monitoring of business processes enables the early discovery of problems and errors already during process enactment. Two approaches can be pursued to achieve this: real-time, also called online monitoring, and offline monitoring. A subtask of real-time monitoring is to determine the current progress of a business process, which is particularly challenging if the latter is composed of loosely coupled, smaller processes that interact with each other, like object lifecycle processes in data-centric approaches to BPM, which result in large process structures. This position paper discusses the challenges of determining the progress of such object-aware processes in real-time and defines research questions that need to be investigated in further work.