Processes and business process models involve rules and decisions describing the premises and possible outcomes of specific situations. However, important though they are, rules and decisions are often hidden in process flows, process activities or in the head of employees (tacit knowledge), so that they need to be discovered using state-of-art intelligent techniques. For knowledge-intensive processes it is common that rules and decisions, as opposed to the process-flow, define the allowed behaviour of a process. E.g., the major purpose of an insurance claim process is to ensure that the rules governing the claim are being followed and to arrive at a final decision. 

While traditional imperative notations such as BPMN excel at describing "happy paths", they turn out to be rather inadequate for modelling rules and decisions. Imperative notations indeed tend to describe possible behaviour as alternative, restricted flows. But encompassing all possible variations makes imperative models cluttered and thus impractical in highly flexible scenarios. Against this background, a new declarative modelling paradigm has been proposed that aims to directly capture the business rules or constraints underlying the process. The approach has gained momentum in recent years, and several declarative notations have been developed such as Declare, DCR Graphs, DMN, GSM and eCRG. Lately, there has been a rapidly growing interest in hybrid approaches, which combine the strengths of different modelling paradigms.

In this workshop, we are interested in the application and challenges of decision- and rule-based modelling in all phases of the BPM lifecycle (identification, discovery, analysis, redesign, implementation and monitoring).

The purpose of the workshop is therefore:

• To examine the relationship between rules, decisions and processes, including models; not only to model the process , but also to model the rules and decisions.
• To enhance rule and decision mining based on process data (e.g. event logs)
• To examine decision goals, structures , and their connection with business processes, in order to find a good integration between rule- and decision-based modelling and flow-based modelling.
• To examine standards (DMN, CMMN, BPMN) and their integration.
• To study how different process models can be designed to fit a decision process, according to various optimization criteria, such as throughput time, use of resources, etc.
• To study the integration between different modelling paradigms.
• To show best practices in separating process, rule and decision concerns.

List of Topics

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: 

• Declarative and hybrid (process modelling) approaches

  • Declarative notations (Declare, DCR Graphs, GSM, eCRG, …)
  • Decision & goal notations (DMN, PDM, …)
  • Declarative and hybrid modelling methodologies
  • Process metrics
  • Process maintenance and flexibility
  • Human-centered and flexible processes
  • Decision rules and processes
  • Decision models and structures
  • Formal analysis (e.g., expressiveness proofs) of declarative and hybrid notations
  • Formal verification (e.g. model-checking and static analysis) of declarative and hybrid models
  • Run-time adaptation of declarative and hybrid process models

• Decision mining and declarative/hybrid process mining

  • Decision mining
  • Declarative process mining
  • Hybrid process mining
  • Data mining for decision and declarative/hybrid process analysis
  • Rule mining for decision and declarative/hybrid process analysis
  • Modeling challenges to combine static information of business

• Applications of decision- and rule-modelling in BPM

  • Goal-driven processes
  • Knowledge-intensive processes
  • Business process compliance
  • Knowledge workflow management
  • Usability and understandability studies
  • Case studies
  • Tools

Committees

Program Committee

• Bart Baesens, KU Leuven, Belgium
• Andrea Burattin, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
• Josep Carmona, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Spain
• Paolo Ceravolo, University of Milan, Italy
• Massimiliano de Leoni, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
• Riccardo De Masellis, Stockholm University, Italy
• Johannes De Smedt, University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom
• Jochen De Weerdt, KU Leuven, Belgium
• Chiara Di Francescomarino, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Italy
• Robert Golan, DBmind Technologies Inc., United States
• María Teresa Gómez-López, Universidad de Sevilla, Spain
• Xunhua Guo, Tsinghua University, China
• Thomas Hildebrandt, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Amin Jalali, Stockholm University, Sweden
• Dimitris Karagiannis, University of Vienna, Austria
• Fabrizio M. Maggi, University of Tartu, Estonia
• Andrea Marrella, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
• Marco Montali, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy
• Jorge Munoz-Gama, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Chile
• Artem Polyvyanyy, Queensland University of Technology, Australia
• Stefan Schönig, University of Bayreuth, Germany
• Lucinéia H. Thom, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
• Han van der Aa, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Wil M.P. van der Aalst, RWTH Aachen University, Germany
• Barbara Weber, Technical University of Denmark, Denmark
• Matthias Weidlich, Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany
• Mathias Weske, Hasso Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Germany

Organising committee

• Claudio Di Ciccio, WU Vienna, Austria
• Jan Vanthienen, KU Leuven, Belgium
• Tijs Slaats, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
• Dennis Schunselaar, VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• Søren Debois, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Submission Guidelines

Prospective authors are invited to submit papers on any of the topics of the workshop. Papers must be written in English. The following types of submission are accepted:

• full research papers and experience papers (max. 12 pages),
• short papers (position paper, work in progress, software demonstration; max. 6 pages).

Submissions must be prepared according to the Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) format specified by Springer (see instructions). The title page must contain a short abstract and a list of keywords, preferably using the list of topics given above. Papers should be submitted electronically via EasyChair.

Publication

All accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings. They will be distributed electronically on USB sticks. The post-proceedings will be published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing (LNBIP) series, in a single volume dedicated to the proceedings of all BPM 2018 workshops. During a time window after the conference the workshop participants will be granted the free download of the papers.

At least one author of each accepted manuscript must register for the workshop and present the paper.

Contact

Contact the chairs at the following email address: dehmimop2018 [at] easychair [dot] org