The motivation behind the conception of this monograph was to advance scientific knowledge about the design and control of workflow processes. A workflow pr- ess (or workflow for short) is a specific type of business process, a way of or- nizing work and resources. Workflows are commonly found within large admin- trative organizations such as banks, insurance companies, and governmental agencies. Carrying out the tasks of a workflow in a particular order is required to handle one type of case. Examples of cases are mortgage applications, customer complaints, and claims for unemployment benefits. A workflow used in handling mortgage applications may contain tasks for recording the application, specifying a mortgage proposal, and approving the final policy. The monograph concentrates on four workflow-related issues within the area of Business Process Management; the field of designing and controlling business processes. The first issue is how workflows can be adequately modeled. Workflow mod- ing is an indispensable activity to support any reasoning about workflows. Diff- ent purposes of workflow modeling can be distinguished, such as system ena- ment by Workflow Management Systems, knowledge management, costing, and budgeting. The focus of workflow modeling in this monograph is (a) to support simulation and analysis of workflows and (b) to specify a new workflow design. The main formalism used for the modeling of workflows is the Petri net. Many - isting notions to define several relevant properties have been adopted, such as the workflow net and the soundness notion.

The motivation behind the conception of this monograph was to advance scientific knowledge about the design and control of workflow processes. A workflow pr- ess (or workflow for short) is a specific type of business process, a way of or- nizing work and resources. Workflows are commonly found within large admin- trative organizations such as banks, insurance companies, and governmental agencies. Carrying out the tasks of a workflow in a particular order is required to handle one type of case. Examples of cases are mortgage applications, customer complaints, and claims for unemployment benefits. A workflow used in handling mortgage applications may contain tasks for recording the application, specifying a mortgage proposal, and approving the final policy. The monograph concentrates on four workflow-related issues within the area of Business Process Management; the field of designing and controlling business processes. The first issue is how workflows can be adequately modeled. Workflow mod- ing is an indispensable activity to support any reasoning about workflows. Diff- ent purposes of workflow modeling can be distinguished, such as system ena- ment by Workflow Management Systems, knowledge management, costing, and budgeting. The focus of workflow modeling in this monograph is (a) to support simulation and analysis of workflows and (b) to specify a new workflow design. The main formalism used for the modeling of workflows is the Petri net. Many - isting notions to define several relevant properties have been adopted, such as the workflow net and the soundness notion.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to workflow management, the management of business processes with information technology. By defining, analyzing, and redesigning an organization's resources and operations, workflow management systems ensure that the right information reaches the right person or computer application at the right time. The book provides a basic overview of workflow terminology and organization, as well as detailed coverage of workflow modeling with Petri nets. Because Petri nets make definitions easier to understand for nonexperts, they facilitate communication between designers and users. The book includes a chapter of case studies, review exercises, and a glossary. A special Web site developed by the authors, www.workflowcourse.com, features animation, interactive examples, lecture materials, exercises and solutions, relevant links, and other valuable resources for the classroom.

Workflow-based Process Controlling Systems provide companies with the ability to measure the operational performance of their business processes in a timely and accurate fashion. The combination of workflow audit trails with data warehouse technology and operational business data allows for complex analyses that can support managers in their assessment of an organization's performance. The increasing maturity of business process management and data warehouse systems enables the design and development of advanced process-oriented management information systems. Michael zur Muehlen discusses the integration of workflow audit trail data with existing data warehouse structures and develops a reference architecture for process-oriented management information systems. Starting with an organizational and technical analysis of process organizations, this book provides a comprehensive documentation of business process management, workflow technology, and existing standardization efforts. The proposed reference architecture is validated in an industry context. A prototypical implementation of the reference architecture and its integration with a commercial business process management system are demonstrated as well. This book is directed at both practitioners and academics in the fields of business process management, management accounting, and information systems research.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings of 6 internationl workshops held in Brisbane, Australia, in conjunction with the 5th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2007, in September 2007. The 45 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 80 submissions to the following 6 international workshops: Business Process Intelligence (BPI 2007), Business Process Design (BPD 2007), Collaborative Business Processes (CBP 2007), Process-oriented Information Systems in Healthcare (ProHealth 2007), Reference Modeling (RefMod 2007), and Advances in Semantics for Web Services (semantics4ws 2007).

In recent years the management of business processes has emerged as one of the major developments to ease the understanding of, communication about, and evolution of process-oriented information systems in a variety of appli- tion domains. Based on explicit representations of business processes, process stakeholders can communicate about process structure, content, and possible improvements. Formal analysis, veri?cation and simulation techniques have the potential to show de?cits and to e?ectively lead to better and more ?exible processes. Process mining facilitates the discovery of process speci?cations from process logs that are readily available in many organizations. This volume of Springer’s Lecture Notes in Computer Science contains the papers presented at the 2nd International Conference on Business Process M- agement (BPM 2004) which took place in Potsdam, Germany, in June 2004. From more than 70 submissions BPM 2004 received, 19 high-quality research papers were selected. BPM 2004 is part of a conference series that provides a forum for researchers and practitioners in all aspects of business process management. In June 2003, the 1st International Conference on Business Process Management took place in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Its proceedings were published as Volume 2678 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science by Springer-Verlag. A previous volume (LNCS1806)onBusinessProcessManagementwasbasedonfoureventsdevoted to this topic.