Real-time monitoring of progress in object-aware business processes

A high degree of competition require companies to constantly improve and further develop their business processes (BP). Therefore, optimisations and improvements are an important key element in this endeavour. The monitoring of a BP should detect complications and errors quickly to support this objective. Two approaches can be
pursued to achieve this: real-time, also called online, monitoring and offline monitoring. A sub task of real-time monitoring is determining the current progress of a business process.
Business processes in PHILharmonicFlows consist of objects with lifecycles, describing the behaviour of an object, and coordination processes, which organise and structure the overall business process. The composition of an object-aware business processes is extremely complex. Many instances of objects and lifecycles exist. Running concurrently to each other. Further, there are coordination constraints between objects that restrict
certain executions of the overall business process.
Due of the complexity, there is no intuitive solution for real-time monitoring of progress in an object-aware business process. Progress of the overall business process consists of a combination of the individual progress measures to these contributing parts. Therefore, a method called PHILharmonicFlows Progress Determination (PPD-Method) is developed that can be used to determine the progress of object-aware processes. The progress representation provides users with knowledge of the current status. In addition, standstills can be
detected quickly and subsequently remedied.
As a first step, the PPD-Method uses a fixed snapshot of a business process, taken during execution, to determine progress. This is called a static progress determination and reduces the complexity of the calculation. Based on the static determination, the dynamic aspect of progress execution can be incorporated into the progress
determination, such as instantiation of an object or state changes. This lead to dynamic determination of
progress. The definition of progress for object-aware processes i.e., what constitutes progress, offers several options. Each option is thoroughly assessed and evaluated. According on the metaphor of a progress bar and the structure of the business process, design choices for progress determination for the PPD-Method are identified based on the best option. Finally, this thesis develops algorithms as part of the PPD-Method for the static determination of object lifecycle progress.