Overview
Based on the essential concepts to model business processes, the third week of our course is devoted to the analysis of business process behavior. On the one hand, this refers to verifying that the modeled process behaves correctly and does not get stuck. On the other hand, this includes validation, i.e., checking whether the process model fulfills the modeling goal. The latter can be realized by simulation.
To this end, the following video clips convey the content of this week's lecture.
- Process Behavior
Business processes that do not violate any syntax rules may, nevertheless, be subject to behavioral anomalies, e.g., deadlocks. The analysis of the behavior of a business process can expose such anomalies and provide insights towards their resolution. - Structural Soundness To simplify the analysis of business process behavior, process models are restricted in their structure. A structural sound business process model has only one start node, one end node, and each other node lies on a path from start to end.
- Soundness Explained A process model is sound, if every activity can participate in a process instance and it is ensured that the process always terminates properly. Behavioral anomalies such as deadlocks or livelocks violate soundness. Therefore, a number of rules help avoiding unsound process models.
- Simulating Business Processes
In order to validate business process models for their correct representation of a business process and to evaluate their cost and performance without implementing them, they can be simulated. Step-through simulation allows examining the process' behavior, whereas quantitative simulation enables measuring the performance of particular cases or a distribution of typical scenarios in practice. In an additional video clip for this part, we present you the BIMP simulator, a simple multi-instance simulator for BPMN processes developed at the University of Tartu.
Additionally, this week will be accompanied by a bonus module on Petri nets and process analysis. We will discuss, how BPMN business process models can be represented by Petri nets and how this allows for the formal checking of soundness. In the bonus module you can earn up to 15 additional points to improve your score.
Organization
You can find several self-tests, by which you can check your learning progress. There is no time limit or submission deadline for these tests and you receive direct feedback on your answers. You can even repeat them.
At the end of the week, you need to submit a homework. You should schedule 30-45 min for the homework assignment, which has a hard time limit of 60 minutes. Please be advised that this test can only be started ONCE (closing the browser does not stop the timer). In addition, the homework starts when you click on the start button on the homework page. So, only click on the button if you are willing to take the assignment. The achieved score in the homework contributes to your total score for this course. You will be informed about your results and a sample solution is published a day after the submission deadline.
In case you have questions regarding the lectures, self tests, or assignments, please use the community forum. Often these questions can be answered by your fellow students. Members of the teaching team also read the questions in the forum and help whenever help is needed. We are looking forward to fruitful discussions.
Have fun with the third course week!
Weekly Schedule
Please be aware of the following dates for this week.
- The homework needs to be submitted latest by May 2nd , 2016, at 22:00 (10:00 pm) CET. Submission is already open; after consulting the lecture material (videos, slides, and reading material), you can start on the homework right away.
- The solution for this week's homework will be published on Tuesday, May 3rd , 2016, at 10:00 (am) CET.
- The material for the next week, covering Advanced Business Process Modeling, will be made available on Saturday, April 30th , 2016, at 10:00 (am) CET.
- All times are Central European Summer Time (UTC+2). Please check your local time zone. The remaining time until May 2nd, 2016, at 22:00 (10:00 pm) can be checked at the provided link.
Reading Material
- Section 4.1 of the book Business Process Management – Concepts, Languages, Architectures (discount of 20% for printed version and discount of 50% for electronic version applies for participants of this course) covers the behavior of process models, by investigating different workflow control flow patterns.
- In his seminal article "Verification of workflow nets" Wil Van der Aalst introduces the notion of soundness for workflow nets.
- More details on business process simulation can be found in Dumas, La Rosa, Mendling, Reijers: Fundamentals of Business Process Management. Springer 2013