Degree Thesis

My degree thesis with the German title Nutzer- und aufgabenzentrierte Auswertung der Erfülltheit semantischer Constraints in Prozess-Management-Systemen (User-friendly and task-centric evaluation of the compliance of business processes with semantic constraints) was written from february to july 2010 at the Institute of Datenbases and Information Systems at Ulm University. I was mentored by Dr. Thao Ly, the examiners were Prof. Dr. Peter Dadam and Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert.

• Download the thesis German, PDF File, 2.1 MB
• User’s manual for demonstrator application German, PDF File, 510 KB

The thesis has been written in German, but a translation of the abstract is provided below.

Abstract

The utilization of Business Process Management (BPM) systems enables new possibilities to check the compliance of business processes with preconditions and rules over the course of their whole lifecycle. Especially when a process is checked during its construction, it’s not sufficient to only give the user the information whether the process complies with a rule or violates it – it’s often the case that the level compliance depends on the course of the process execution. Also in extensive process models and rules the reason for incompliance may not be visible at first sight. That’s why a detailed visualization of the results is necessary so the user can recognize in which cases and for what reasons a rule gets violated by a process execution. The presentation has to be clear and comprehensible for the user, so that errors in the interpretation of the results are avoided and a fast and easy correction of the errors becomes possible.

This thesis evaluates various usage scenarios of integrity rules in the field of Business Process Management and deduces requirements for the presentation of the results of their evaluation. A result structure is presented, which can flexibly accommodate the results of different evaluation algorithms. Thereafter the concept of a user interface is demonstrated which allows users to analyse the results according to their specific tasks and requirements, understand their implications and recognize necessary actions. My work focuses on the integrated visualization of the results within the process view. Through this it can be demonstrated under which circumstances during the execution of the process rules get violated and what leads to the violations. Different possibilities for adaptation are presented, so that also in extensive processes a clear visualization is possible. The presented user interface has been implemented in a working application for demonstration purposes. Its design and implementation are also explained in this work.

Realization

The implementation of the demonstration application is based on the AristaFlow BPM Suite which has been developed by the Institute of Databases and Information Systems at Ulm University and AristaFlow. The demonstration application was created as a plugin for the AristaFlow Process Template Editor, which is based on the Eclipse platform.

Therefore development of the plugin was done in the Java programming language, using AristaFlow’s and Eclipse’s development libraries. The user interface uses the Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) of Eclipse. The created code was documented using JavaDoc.