Authors:
Lisa Arnold
;
Marius Breitmayer
and
Manfred Reichert
Affiliation:
Institute of Databases and Information Systems, Ulm University, James-Franck-Ring, 89081 Ulm, Germany
Keyword(s):
Object-centric Business Process, Business Process Monitoring, Business Object, Process Progress.
Abstract:
A fundamental task of any business process monitoring component is to continuously determine the progress of the running processes of an enterprise. This is particularly challenging when facing dynamic processes undergoing changes during run-time, which most likely affect the progress of the respective processes as well. This paper considers object-centric business processes, which consist of business objects and their relations. During run-time, these business objects may be instantiated multiple times to form object instances. The run-time behaviour of these object instances is manifested in terms of object lifecycles that interact with each other. For monitoring a single business object five alternative methods are introduced, which allow determining the progress based on average calculations, information about the semantic object relations (hierarchical order, minimal and maximal cardinality), or event logs (if available). For all methods, the precalculated progress of individual
object instances is leveraged. To evaluate the different methods, an empirical study with 65 participants was conducted. As key observation, the majority of the participants that are experienced with process modelling and monitoring tools, prefer deriving the progress of a business object from event logs. The results of this paper are fundamental for determining the progress of a holistic object-centric business process.
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