Ingo Weber

Technische Universität München | TUM · School of Computation Information & Technology

In order to better facilitate the need for continuous business process improvement, the application of DevOps principles has been proposed. In particular, the AB-BPM methodology applies AB testing—a DevOps practice—and reinforcement learning to increase the speed and quality of business process improvement efforts. In this paper, we provide an indu...

Blockchain technology is known for its transparency properties due to its publicly available, immutable data. Yet, as data availability does not inherently ensure transparency, further analytical methods may be required for human interpretation of data traces. Process mining has emerged as a popular toolbox for understanding processes and how they...

Large language models (LLMs) have been touted to enable increased productivity in many areas of today's work life. Scientific research as an area of work is no exception: The potential of LLM‐based tools to assist in the daily work of scientists has become a highly discussed topic across disciplines. However, we are only at the very onset of this s...

The promise of an internet-based 'sharing economy' stands corrected by the reality of a 'platform economy' under the control of a few central proprietary markets. With increasing awareness of the many downsides of these oligopolistic markets, regulatory policies like the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA) have been enacted, while in research and practice...

The growing popularity of blockchains highlights the need to improve their scalability. While previous research has focused on scaling transaction processing, the scalability of transaction creation remains unexplored. This issue is particularly important for organizations needing to send large volumes of transactions quickly or continuously. Scali...

The continued success of Large Language Models (LLMs) and other generative artificial intelligence approaches highlights the advantages that large information corpora can have over rigidly defined symbolic models, but also serves as a proof-point of the challenges that purely statistics-based approaches have in terms of safety and trustworthiness....

Blockchain technology streamlines multi-party collaborations in decentralized settings, especially where trust is limited. While public blockchains enhance transparency and reliability, they conflict with confidentiality. To address this, we introduce Multi-Authority Approach to Transaction Systems for Interoperating Applications (MARTSIA). MARTSIA...

Process (or workflow) execution on blockchain suffers from limited scalability; specifically, costs in the form of transactions fees are a major limitation for employing traditional public blockchain platforms in practice. Research, so far, has mainly focused on exploring first (Bitcoin) and second-generation (e.g., Ethereum) blockchains for busine...

Given the continuous global degradation of the Earth's ecosystem due to unsustainable human activity, it is increasingly important for enterprises to evaluate the effects they have on the environment. Consequently, assessing the impact of business processes on sustainability is becoming an important consideration in the discipline of Business Proce...

Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) are a promising approach to overcome scalability issues of blockchains. To achieve efficient payments in PCNs, it is necessary to route transactions between a payer and a payee. Especially in large-scale PCNs, multi-hop routing becomes necessary, since transactions need to be relayed by nodes. For this, a scalable ro...

Large language models (LLMs) have been touted to enable increased productivity in many areas of today's work life. Scientific research as an area of work is no exception: the potential of LLM-based tools to assist in the daily work of scientists has become a highly discussed topic across disciplines. However, we are only at the very onset of this s...

Process mining provides a set of techniques and algorithms to analyze, support, and improve business processes based on process execution data. Process discovery aims at deducing a representative process model of real-world execution. So far, process discovery algorithms have been mainly compared regarding their output quality but not yet with rega...

Multi-party business processes rely on the collaboration of various players in a decentralized setting. Blockchain technology can facilitate the automation of these processes, even in cases where trust among participants is limited. Transactions are stored in a ledger, a replica of which is retained by every node of the blockchain network. The oper...

The increasing popularity of blockchains raises the question of how to improve their scalability. While researchers are exploring ways to scale the on-chain processing of transactions, the scalability of the off-chain creation of transactions has not been investigated yet. This is relevant for organizations wishing to send a high volume of transact...

Process mining event logs are traditionally formatted to reflect the execution of a collection of individual process instances, with a fixed case notion. In practice, process instances are often intertwined, and the scope of a particular process is less static. When flattening complex application data to traditional event log formats, like XES, pro...

Process mining event logs are traditionally formatted to reflect the execution of a collection of individual process instances, with a fixed case notion. In practice, process instances are often intertwined, and the scope of a particular process is less static. When flattening complex application data to traditional event log formats, like XES, pro...

The continued success of Large Language Models (LLMs) and other generative artificial intelligence approaches highlights the advantages that large information corpora can have over rigidly defined symbolic models, but also serves as a proof-point of the challenges that purely statistics-based approaches have in terms of safety and trustworthiness....

For the enactment of inter-organizational processes, blockchain can guarantee the enforcement of process models and the integrity of execution traces. However, existing solutions come with downsides regarding throughput scalability, latency, and suboptimal tradeoffs between confidentiality and transparency. To address these issues, we propose to ch...

Blockchain technology is apt to facilitate the automation of multi-party cooperations among various players in a decentralized setting, especially in cases where trust among participants is limited. Transactions are stored in a ledger, a replica of which is retained by every node of the blockchain network. The operations saved thereby are thus publ...

Oftentimes, architectural information is not well-maintained, while software is developed and thus is out of sync with the product. Development of architectural models and documentation is therefore frequently done (i) before development starts and quickly becomes outdated, or (ii) as an afterthought or step taken when, e.g., significant refactorin...

As the digitalization of the human world progresses, people, systems, machines, and other entities are forming dynamic and unpredictable ecosystems. Such ecosystems emerge from the mutual interaction of constituent and individual systems, which might be driven by collaborative, competitive, or even malicious goals. In these ecosystems, enhanced by...

In order to better facilitate the need for continuous business process improvement, the application of DevOps principles has been proposed. In particular, the AB-BPM methodology applies AB testing and reinforcement learning to increase the speed and quality of improvement efforts. In this paper, we provide an industry perspective on this approach,...

Blockchain technology has become one of the most popular trends in IT over the last few years. Its increasing popularity and the discovery of ever more use cases raises the question of how to improve scalability. While researchers are exploring ways to scale the on-chain processing of transactions, the scalability of the off-chain creation of trans...

For the enactment of inter-organizational processes, blockchain can guarantee the enforcement of process models and the integrity of execution traces. However, existing solutions come with downsides regarding throughput scalability, latency, and suboptimal tradeoffs between confidentiality and transparency. To address these issues, we propose to ch...

It may be tempting for researchers to stick to incremental extensions of their current work to plan future research activities. Yet there is also merit in realizing the grand challenges in one’s field. This paper presents an overview of the nine major research problems for the Business Process Management discipline. These challenges have been colle...

Multi-party business processes rely on the collaboration of various players in a decentralized setting. Blockchain technology can facilitate the automation of these processes, even in cases where trust among participants is limited. Transactions are stored in a ledger, a replica of which is retained by every node of the blockchain network. The oper...

On their trajectory through educational university systems, students leave a trace of event data. The analysis of that event data with a process lens poses a set of domain-specific challenges that is addressed in the field of Educational Process Mining (EPM). Despite the vast potential for understanding the progress of students and improving the qu...

In order to better facilitate the need for continuous business process improvement, the application of DevOps principles has been proposed. In particular, the AB-BPM methodology applies AB testing and reinforcement learning to increase the speed and quality of improvement efforts. In this paper, we provide an industry perspective on this approach,...

Our world and many industries, such as healthcare or consulting, are becoming more digital and focused on knowledge workers. In consequence, flexible, knowledge-intensive business processes are increasingly relevant for organizations, and subject to increased interest. Case management languages support the management of knowledge-intensive processe...

AI-Augmented Business Process Management Systems (ABPMSs) are an emerging class of process-aware information systems, empowered by trustworthy AI technology. An ABPMS enhances the execution of business processes with the aim of making these processes more adaptable, proactive, explainable, and context-sensitive. This manifesto presents a vision for...

In business process landscapes, a common challenge is to provide the necessary computational resources to enact the single process steps. One well-known approach to solve this issue in a cost-efficient way is to use the notion of elasticity, i.e., to provide cloud-based computational resources in a rapid fashion and to enact the single process step...

On their trajectory through educational university systems, students leave a trace of event data. The analysis of that event data with a process lens poses a set of domain-specific challenges that is addressed in the field of Educational Process Mining (EPM). Despite the vast potential for understanding the progress of students and improving the qu...

Organizations improve their business processes regularly to react to clients' requests, changing business environments, or regulations. However, applying a changed process design directly in an organization is risky: frequently, process changes do not result in actual improvements. In this demo, we present a tool for AB testing of process versions...

In business process landscapes, a common challenge is to provide the necessary computational resources to enact the single process steps. One well-known approach to solve this issue in a cost-efficient way is to use the notion of elasticity, i.e., to provide cloud-based computational resources in a rapid fashion and to enact the single process step...

Blockchain has been proposed to facilitate the enactment of interorganisational business processes. For such processes, blockchain can guarantee the enforcement of rules and the integrity of execution traces—without the need for a centralised trusted party. However, the enactment of interorganisational processes pose manifold challenges. In this wo...

Multi-party business processes are based on the cooperation of different actors in a distributed setting. Blockchains can provide support for the automation of such processes, even in conditions of partial trust among the participants. On-chain data are stored in all replicas of the ledger and therefore accessible to all nodes that are in the netwo...

Conditional payments allow the transfer of money only when pre-defined rules hold. Example uses could include welfare payments, employee expenses, insurance payouts, or tied donations. Normally, conditions are checked manually in reimbursement or pre-approval/audit processes, either at accounts before funds are distributed, or using account records...

Context Agile methodologies and frameworks are widely used in software development projects because of their support for continuous change and delivery. Agile software development advocates de-prioritizing aspects such as processes and documentation. In traditional software engineering methodologies, however, business process models have been exten...

Multi-party business processes are based on the cooperation of different actors in a distributed setting. Blockchain can provide support for the automation of such processes, even in conditions of partial trust among the participants. However, on-chain data are stored in all replicas of the ledger and therefore accessible to all nodes that are in t...

Blockchain has been proposed to facilitate the enactment of interorganisational business processes. For such processes, blockchain can guarantee the enforcement of rules and the integrity of execution traces - without the need for a centralised trusted party. However, the enactment of interorganisational processes pose manifold challenges. In this...

Within this Technical Report, we present the full analysis of 61 routing protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) for the purposes of routing in Payment Channel Networks (PCNs). In addition, we present the full results of the implementation of the three algorithms E-TORA, TERP, and M-DART.

The design and analysis of process models is a critical factor for organizational improvement across various industries. Thanks to its potential to enable common understanding and foster automation, process modeling is increasingly adopted in the healthcare sector. However, the complexity of the healthcare domain makes process modeling a challengin...

Augmented Business Process Management Systems (ABPMSs) are an emerging class of process-aware information systems that draws upon trustworthy AI technology. An ABPMS enhances the execution of business processes with the aim of making these processes more adaptable, proactive, explainable, and context-sensitive. This manifesto presents a vision for...

DevOps is a set of practices in software engineering that is in high demand by industry. It is a dynamic field which constantly adds new methods and tools. Teaching DevOps prepares today's computer science students for best-practices in a working environment but challenges university lecturers to provide central concepts while staying up-to-date wi...

Blockchain technology is increasingly used to realize decentralized applications and execute cross-organizational processes. Understanding how an application is used and how partners and users participate is essential to avoid failures and plan improvements. This understanding can be built by analyzing logs; but although data is in principle given...

Through its smart contract capabilities, blockchain has become a technology for automating cross-organizational processes on a neutral platform. Process mining has emerged as a popular toolbox for understanding processes and how they are executed in practice. While researchers have recently created techniques for the challenging task of extracting...

Event logs have become a valuable information source for business process management, e.g., when analysts discover process models to inspect the process behavior and to infer actionable insights. To this end, analysts configure discovery pipelines in which logs are filtered, enriched, abstracted, and process models are derived. While pipeline opera...

Process mining has become an established set of tools and methods for analyzing process data, while blockchain is emerging as a platform for decentralized applications and inter-organizational processes. Approaches and tools have been developed for analyzing blockchain data with process mining methods, including the tools created by us: BlockXES, E...

Situation faced: One large set of problems in Australian agricultural supply chains comprises liquidity and payment certainty: Farmers are typically paid for their goods after long delays, and sometimes payment fails altogether. At the same time, first buyers of crops (exporters, traders, processors, feedlots) have limited funds as they, like the f...

For delivering products or services to their clients, organizations execute manifold business processes. During such execution, upcoming process tasks need to be allocated to internal resources. Resource allocation is a complex decision-making problem with high impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of processes. A wide range of approaches was...

This chapter introduces blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), smart contracts, and how they work. The relevance of these technologies will be discussed in brief for a set of use cases. DLT, blockchain, and smart contracts allow building a distinct set of applications, which we refer to as blockchain-based applications. For such app...

Through its smart contract capabilities, blockchain has become a technology for automating cross-organizational processes on a neutral platform. Process mining has emerged as a popular toolbox for understanding processes and how they are executed in practice. While researchers have recently created techniques for the challenging task of extracting...

Event logs have become a valuable information source for business process management, e.g., when analysts discover process models to inspect the process behavior and to infer actionable insights. To this end, analysts configure discovery pipelines in which logs are filtered, enriched, abstracted, and process models are derived. While pipeline opera...

Event logs have become a valuable information source for business process management, e.g., when analysts discover process models to inspect the process behavior and to infer actionable insights. To this end, analysts configure discovery pipelines in which logs are filtered, enriched, abstracted, and process models are derived. While pipeline opera...

Event logs have become a valuable information source for business process management, e.g., when analysts discover process models to inspect the process behavior and to infer actionable insights. To this end, analysts configure discovery pipelines in which logs are filtered, enriched, abstracted, and process models are derived. While pipeline opera...

Blockchain is a novel distributed ledger technology. Through its features and smart contract capabilities, a wide range of application areas opened up for blockchain-based innovation [5]. In order to analyse how concrete blockchain systems as well as blockchain applications are used, data must be extracted from these systems. Due to various complex...

The cover image is based on the Research Article Integrated model-driven engineering of blockchain applications for business processes and asset management by Qinghua Lu et al., https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.2931

Conditional payments allow the transfer of money only when predefined rules hold. Example uses could include welfare payments, employee expenses, insurance payouts, or tied donations. Normally, conditions are checked manually in reimbursement or pre-approval/audit processes, either at accounts before funds are distributed, or using account records...

Blockchains have been applied in different domains to guarantee data integrity and provide a decentralized computational infrastructure for executing smart contracts. Multiple blockchain-related patterns have been summarized by academics and industry practitioners covering different aspects, such as engineering applications on top of a blockchain,...

his book constitutes the proceedings of the Blockchain and RPA Forum, held as part of the 19th International Conference on Business Process Management, BPM 2021, which took place during September 6-10, 2021, in Rome, Italy. The Blockchain Forum and the RPA Forum have in common that they are centered around an emerging and exciting technology. The b...

Blockchain has attracted broad interests to build decentralised applications. A typical class of applications uses blockchain for the management of cross‐organisational business processes as well as assets. However, developing such applications without introducing vulnerabilities is hard for developers, not the least because the deployed code is im...

Blockchain has evolved into a platform for decentralized applications, with beneficial properties like high integrity, transparency, and resilience against censorship and tampering. However, blockchains are closed-world systems which do not have access to external state. To overcome this limitation, oracles have been introduced in various forms and...

Blockchain has evolved into a platform for decentralized applications, with beneficial properties like high integrity, transparency, and resilience against censorship and tampering. However, blockchains are closed-world systems which do not have access to external state. To overcome this limitation, oracles have been introduced in various forms and...

In blockchain-based process execution, operational aspects of business processes are encoded in smart contracts on blockchains, enabling powerful auditing and compliance capabilities due to the platforms’ trust and integrity guarantees. However, smart contracts are subject to the blockchain’s conceptual limitations, which particularly restrict the...

Many definitions of business processes refer to business goals, value creation, profits, etc. Nevertheless, the focus of formal methods research on business processes lies on the correctness of the execution semantics of models w.r.t. properties like deadlock freedom, liveness, or completion guarantees. However, the question of whether participants...

Process models are a central element of modern business process management technology. When adopting such technology, organizations inevitably establish process model collections which, depending on the degree of adoption, can reach sizes of thousands of models. Process model matching techniques are intended to assist experts in the management of s...

Blockchain technology enables the execution of collaborative business processes involving mutually untrusted parties. Existing tools allow such processes to be modeled using high-level notations and compiled into smart contracts that can be deployed on blockchain platforms. However, these tools do not provide mechanisms to cope with the flexibility...

Blockchain has evolved into a platform for decentralized applications, with beneficial properties like high integrity, transparency, and resilience against censorship and tampering. However, blockchains are closed-world systems which do not have access to external state. To overcome this limitation, oracles have been introduced in various forms and...

In blockchain-based process execution, operational aspects of business processes are encoded in smart contracts on blockchains, enabling powerful auditing and compliance capabilities due to the platforms' trust and integrity guarantees. However, smart contracts are subject to the blockchain's conceptual limitations, which particularly restrict the...