MRI-BP 2013 - Workshop on Methodologies for Robustness Injection into Business Processes

Within the area of business processes, trends for BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), BOM (Business Operations Management), BPI (Business Process Intelligence), and CEP (Complex Event Processing) are increasingly becoming an essential part of organizations’ arsenals for verifying that their operations are happening within defined boundaries, responding to deviations, and keeping up with a dynamic, open, and competitive business environment in which business processes are no longer monolithic.
This modern nature of business processes brings about challenges in that transactions are distributed, take different paths, involve the coordination of multiple people, machines, and services, and require data/business artifacts to construct a business context from different tiers. While there may be a single?or a few?happy path(s)/process(es), a robust e-business application needs to accommodate various failure points arising from people’s unavailability, service failures, business rule changes, human mistakes, or simply changes of plan.
One may leverage business process specification languages that offer a structured mechanism for exception handling. An effort then has to be spent during process modeling for these exceptional situations to be enumerated and their management processes to be specified. Naturally, these what-if scenarios usually mobilize the bulk of the business analysis and development effort. Further, business analysts and developers have little guidance in designing and implementing those processes. Even if analysts can put safeguards for these scenarios in place, some exceptions cannot be predicted until they happen, and their consequences may be severe. Mechanisms to roll back or compensate for the exceptions’ effects need to be put in place.
The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in business process robustness and in methodologies for injecting robustness artifacts and mechanisms (exception handling activities, service level agreements, compensation processes, etc.) in process models through assistive or automated techniques. The workshop seeks contributions that have used reasoning on process semantics, discovery of process attributes (performance, organizational), proactive BAM models, and process repair and extension, for the purpose of enhancing the resilience of a process model or of the modeling process.
Main Topics
The areas for contribution include, but are not limited to, the following:
Resilient processes / Process flexibility
Reasoning and semantics of business processes
Ontological frameworks for contingency inference
Assistive techniques for robust process modeling
Compensation and exception handling mechanisms
Process enhancement through repair and extension
Business transaction management
Improving scope of BAM techniques
Business process analytics
Correlation of events within process data
Monitoring and exception handling in data-centric business processes
Process recovery mechanisms
Submission Guidelines
We solicit two types of papers:
Short papers (5 pages) discussing controversial issues in the field or describe interesting or thought-provoking ideas that are not yet fully developed; and
Full papers (10 pages) describing more mature results than short papers.
All submissions must be made in PDF format and comply with the IEEE Computer Society Conference Proceedings Format Guidelines. Papers must be submitted as PDF files using EasyChair (link below). All submissions should be in English. All papers must not have been previously published or submitted elsewhere.