Object-centric processes from A to Z

1st International Workshop (co-located with BPM 2023)
Utrecht, the Netherlands 

About

Traditionally, processes are modelled and discovered primarily considering their control-flow dimension, while disregarding other key dimensions that affect the control flow, such as the data dimension. Consequently, the resulting models are unable to suitably represent real-life, widespread processes where behaviour arises from the complex interplay among multiple business objects and their one-to-many/many-to-many relationships. ​New paradigms that combine data and processes, such as object-centric processes, present new perspectives to the field of business process management, but also bring new challenges. 

On the one hand, object-centric processes toned to be correctly specified and modelled. Such multi-perspective models are intrinsically difficult to analyse. This calls for a suitable trade-off between expressiveness and feasibility of analytic techniques. In addition, object-centric models can span a complex network containing many processes and objects. Thus, they bring great potential to create models that cross process and organisational boundaries that current modelling techniques impose. 

On the other hand, process mining focus on the discovery and analysis of object-centric models from event data, which poses a twofold challenge. First, the current notion of event logs fail in representing event data for object-centric processes. Conventional event logs contain isolated traces, whereas object-centric processes require richer, relational and graph-structured representations of the event data. Second, novel process mining techniques and suitable event data/log formats have to be studied so as to operate over such complex data and fully unleash the insights hidden therein. This also brings the need to ensure that modelling constructs in object-centric process notations can be effectively and efficiently discovered and analysed. 

The main objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers from the fields of BPM and PM who work on object-centric process to share their ideas and current research and to discuss challenges and future directions of the field. 

Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • object-centric process modelling (formal and conceptual foundations, best practices etc)
  • extensions of object-centric formalisms
  • syntactic and semantic properties, correctness criteria
  • object-centric process composition
  • collaborating object-centric processes
  • formal techniques for object-centric process analysis
  • object-centric event log formats
  • data preparation for object-centric log extraction
  • discovery, conformance checking and monitoring
  • conceptual foundations of object-centric process representation
  • object-awareness vs. object-centricity
  • experience reports on teaching object-centric processes
  • insightful surveys and case studies on adoption and application of object-centric approaches  
  • visionary papers 

Program

09:00 - 10:30

  • Opening 
  • Addressing Convergence, Divergence, and Deficiency Issues. Jan Niklas Adams and Wil van der Aalst  
  • Predictive Analytics for Object-centric Processes: Do Graph Neural Networks Really Help? Riccardo Galanti and Massimiliano de Leoni  
  • Modeling, Exploring and Querying Object-Centric Process Logs - Relational v. Graph Databases. Akhil Kumar Kumar and Pnina Soffer  
  • A Model-Driven Engineering perspective for the Object-Centric Event Data (OCED) metamodel. Daniel Calegari and Andrea Delgado  
  • Typed Petri Nets with Variable Arc Weights. Irina A. Lomazova, Alexey A. Mitsyuk and Andrey Rivkin  

11:15 - 12:45

  • From Cases to Objects and Relations - and Beyond. Dirk Fahland  

    Abstract: Processes are complex phenomena that emerge from the interplay of human actors, materials, data, and machines. How to model and analyze this complexity in a faithful and tangible way has been subject of BPM and Process Mining research for over 20 years. The recently proposed "object-centric" view identified a very limited set of concepts that are surprisingly powerful in analyzing and understanding real processes.

    In this talk, Dirk will give an overview on the core concepts of "object-centric" process modeling and process mining and discuss how subtle adaptations of earlier ideas led to this simple but powerful "sweet spot". He will review which new analysis use cases and insights are enabled by object-centric concepts and how they can be generalized in simple ways to consider process dynamics beyond data objects or "object-centric process executions".

    Through this talk, Dirk wants to broaden the uptake of object-centric process mining in research and in practice by structuring the landscape of research challenges around object-centric process mining and highlighting its value for BPM.  

  • Discussion and closing  

Programme
Committee

Han van der Aa, University of Mannheim, Germany
Wil van der Aalst, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
Johannes De Smedt, KU Leuven, Belgium
Rik Eshuis, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Peter Fettke, German Research Center for Artificial Inteilligence (DFKI) and Saarland University, Germany
Irina Lomazova, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Russia
Xixi Lu, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Jan Mendling, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany
Giovanni Meroni, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
Jorge Munoz-Gama, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile
Artem Polyvyanyy, The University of Melbourne, Australia
Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, Technical University of Munich, Germany
Michael Rosemann, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Natalia Sidorova, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Monique Snoeck, KU Leuven, Belgium
Pnina Soffer, University of Haifa, Israel
Gerd Wagner, Brandenburg University of Technology at Cottbus, Germany
Moe Thandar Wynn, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
Francesca Zerbato, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland 

Organizers

Marco Montali , Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
Andrey Rivkin, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
Jan Martijn van der Werf, Utrecht University, The Netherlands