Modern Business Process Automation

Topics covered include: The fundamentals of business process modeling, including workflow patterns, an in-depth treatment of process flexibility, including approaches to dealing with on-the-fly changes, unexpected exceptions, and constraint-based processes, Technological aspects of a modern BPM environment, including its architecture,  process design environment, process engine, resource handler and other support services, a comparative insight into current approaches to business process modeling and execution such as BPMN, EPCs, BPEL, jBPM, OpenWFE, and Enhydra Shark, process mining, verification, integration and configuration; and case studies in health care and screen business.

This book provides a comprehensive treatment of the field of Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on Business Process Automation. It achieves this by covering a wide range of topics, both introductory and advanced, illustrated through and grounded in the YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language) language and corresponding open-source support environment. In doing so it provides the reader with a deep, timeless, and vendor-independent understanding of the essential ingredients of business process automation.

The BPM field is in a continual state of flux and is subject to both the ongoing proposal of new standards and the introduction of new tools and technology. Its fundamentals however are relatively stable and this book aims to equip the reader with both a thorough understanding of them and the ability to apply them to better understand, assess and utilize new developments in the BPM field.

As a consequence of its topic-based format and the inclusion of a broad range of exercises, the book is eminently suitable for use in tertiary education, both at the undergraduate and the postgraduate level, for students of computer science and information systems. BPM researchers and practitioners will also find it a valuable resource. The book serves as a unique reference to a varied and comprehensive collection of topics that are relevant to the business process life-cycle.

Arthur H.M. ter Hofstede, PhD, is a Professor at Queensland University of Technology. He is an original contributor to the well-known workflow patterns as well as a codesigner of the YAWL language and manager of the development of its open-source support environment.
Wil M.P. van der Aalst, PhD, is a Professor at Eindhoven University of Technology and an Adjunct Professor at Queensland University of Technology. He is coauthor of the textbook Workflow Management: Models, Methods, and Systems and editor of several other books in the areas of Business Process Management and Petri nets.
Michael Adams, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at Queensland University of Technology. He has developed the concepts of Worklets and Exlets to deal with workflow evolution and unexpected exceptions in YAWL. In addition, he is currently the technical lead of the YAWL support environment.
Nick Russell, PhD, is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology. He has conducted extensive research in the area of workflow patterns leading to collections of control-flow, data, resource and exception handling patterns. This work formed the basis for newYAWL and the solutions to resource and exception handling in YAWL 2.0.