Process-Awareness of Event-Driven Systems: Model, Analysis and Optimisation

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Process-aware information systems (PAIS) are software systems that monitor and control a process, broadly defined as the coordinated execution of actions towards a certain goal. They rely on an explicit representation of the process, a process model. PAIS have been established in various domains, such as business process automation or collaborative work, and their operation in closed environments is well understood. However, recent trends such as sensing of data and advancing system integration call for process support beyond the boundaries of traditional PAIS. Event processing systems (EPS) collect, analyse, and react to events, thereby providing an infrastructure to operate in open, uncertain environments faced with large amounts of data. Yet, their application as process-aware systems has not been addressed in the literature. Today, EPS are used for process support in an ad-hoc fashion leading to an ineffective decoupling of the implementation of event-processing from the supported process. This project will develop concepts and algorithms that advance the design, analysis, and optimisation of EPS used for process support. As such, we will lay the foundations for using eventprocessing technology in process-oriented applications, an emerging field of research. Based on successful preliminary work, we target the integration of formal methods for process modelling and event processing and the application of process knowledge for quantitative analysis and optimisation of an EPS. The project is planned for 5 years involving two research staff and a research group leader. Besides the scientific results, the project will create prototypical implementations to showcase process-awareness of EPS.