Matthes Elstermann

• Doctor of Engineering
• Acting Professor for Software Engineering at University of Münster

The democratization of artificial intelligence (AI) technology is rapidly progressing and becoming an integral functional part of systems in diverse domains. To maximize the utility of AI in such contexts, ensuring its robustness is of critical significance. The research field of concept drift adaptation (CDA) focuses on the development of strategi...

Intelligent products and the associated value creation form the basis for employment and prosperity in modern industrial societies. A central challenge lies in managing the increasing product and process complexity due to the far-reaching effects of several factors such as globalization, customer orientation, shortened product life cycles, and grow...

Geschäftsprozesse sind unerlässlich, um die Arbeit von Organisationen und die Zusammenarbeit zwischen ihnen zu beschreiben. Sie stellen den Bezugsgegenstand des Prozessmanagements insbesondere im Rahmen digitaler Transformationsprozesse dar, da sie alle wesentlichen Elemente, um Anforderungen und deren Bearbeitung integrativ betrachten, welche an O...

This work is a re-investigation of the concept and developed tools for the modeling approach called, Abstract Layered PASS (ALPS). The paper investigates the details of what is actually two separated extensions to the classical subject-oriented modeling approach with the Parallel Activity Specification Shema (PASS). One is the concept of Layered PA...

Platform economy is well established in the business to customer domain. However, digital platforms are lacking in the business to business realm, especially for SMEs. This work presents a way to create a common frame of reference, that is inevitably needed to efficiently design a digital platform. Following the principles of a Design Thinking appr...

Intelligente Produkte und die damit verbundene Wertschöpfung bilden die Basis für Beschäftigung und Wohlstand moderner Industriegesellschaften. Eine zentrale Herausforderung liegt dabei in der Bewältigung der zunehmenden Produkt- und Prozesskomplexität infolge der weitreichenden Auswirkungen mehrerer Faktoren wie Globalisierung, Kundenorientierung,...

Companies in the wind turbine industry shift to agile product development processes in order to provide the necessary degree of flexibility to react to changing customer requirements. The change in approach creates the need to document the new, highly iterative and collaborative processes. However, there is a lack of suitable process documentation...

The well-known discussion of what kind of research is relevant (brings value to the companies) and rigorous (brings value to the researchers) and thus should be conducted in the discipline of business informatics in general and in the field of business process management (BPM) in particular is ongoing. In this paper, the authors contrast current ri...

In this work we present a summary and analysis of the requirements, structure, and development of an open-source application programming interface (API) library written in C# for .Net, that enables the creation, im- and export, as well as in-memory manipulation of subject-oriented process models. The alps.net.api was created to enable the simple an...

This work is a report on a comparison study done in an industry context with the goal to evaluate three different tools meant to model, simulate, and subsequent evaluate business processes as part of business process management and robot process automation effort. The three compared tools are the SAP Signavio Process Manager, the subject-oriented S...

The term “Digital Twin” is used in context of a wide range of applications but neither research nor industry have agreed upon one singular definition. Presented here is a novel and formal, subject-oriented reference model for Digital Twin systems that does not focus on technical architectural concepts or particular implementation specific details,...

Digital Twins are digital models of Cyber-Physical Systems to enable not only continuous monitoring but also active functional improvement of networked services, physical products, machines and devices. This capacity is of utmost importance when recognizing and exploring business opportunities in terms of organizational and technology innovations,...

This article investigates whether an existing process modelling notation - the Parallel Activity Specification Scheme (PASS) - can support the digitalisation of manufacturing processes. In particular, four aspects are examined that have previously been claimed to be benefits of the PASS notation: ease of modelling, distributed modelling, incrementa...

(Note: this research has been accepted and published in an extended form with additional concept and model derivates. Link: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/362589049_A_subject-oriented_reference_model_for_Digital_Twins ) The interest in the concept called "Digital Twin" is ever-growing. However, the term is used in context of a wide range...

The commissioning of manufacturing plants is considered a complex and at the same time critical phase in the life cycle of a production system, because errors and delays lead to long downtimes and cost-intensive re-work at the start of production. Optimizations and rationalisation of this phase can be implemented by employing the idea of virtual co...

The domain of Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) is somewhat outstanding due to its embracing of Subject Orientation. However, at the same time, it is also a classic BPM domain concerned with typical aspects like creation and exchange of diagrammatic process models, elicitation of domain knowledge, and implementing process (models...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the trendsetting technologies of this time. Consequently, a growing number of people from various domains and backgrounds need to be empowered to understand, evaluate and utilize AI capabilities correctly. Therefore, diverse and novel means to properly describe AI-related methods and technologies as well as to...

In this paper we examine the technical performance of the current version of the semantic exchange standard for the subject-oriented process-modeling language PASS (Parallel Activity Specification Schema). Based on our findings we propose changes to the standard that have the potential to significantly increase the reasoning performance.

For the subject-oriented (business) process modeling language PASS (Parallel Activity Specification Scheme) there are currently two kinds of formal specifications, one for the execution semantics and one for the digital exchange of model descriptions. One uses the Abstract State Machine (ASM) modeling concept, the other is created using the Web Ont...

Approaches of business process management (BPM) are always changing, because underlying business strategies and technological implementation are constantly evolving. Likewise, methodical approaches, how business processes are planned, optimized, managed and controlled, come and go. This article collects and systematizes the trends discussed at majo...

Value Stream Analysis (VSA) is an important tool to assess areas of improvement in manufacturing according to lean principles. Prior research conjectured the hypothesis, that it is possible to use tools from the S-BPM context for this task. This work follows up on this hypothesis and investigates the possibilities to execute value stream mapping us...

In almost all fundamental modeling or description approaches, especially those meant for the domain of (business) process, there is one description aspect often missing that is core to human understanding of the world: the aspect of active entity or the concept of the subject and its strict differentiation from passive entities (objects). This work...

Value Stream Analysis (VSA) is an important tool to assess areas of improvement in manufacturing according to lean principles. Prior research conjectured the hypothesis, that it is possible to use tools from the S-BPM context for this task. This work follows up on this hypothesis and investigates the possibilities to execute value stream mapping us...

Service Prototyping ist ein neuer innovativer Ansatz, mit dem die Service-Entwicklung und die Service-Repräsentation verbessert werden sollen, noch bevor der Service existiert. Service-Prototyping umfasst den innovativen Einsatz aktueller Prototyping-Techniken, -Verfahren, -Methoden und -Tools, die sich positiv auf die Erfolgsquote von Services aus...

The origin of this research was the failed attempt or rather the impossi-bility of creating a working and effective information system to support the processes of Strategic Product Planning, based on existing process descriptions for that domain. This work explores the origins of the according problems. As is discovered, the problems do not origina...

Die Zielsetzung des Forschungsprojekts „Multidimensionales Service Prototyping“ (dimenSion) war es, entsprechend dem Bedarf von Unternehmen, die Anwendbarkeit von Service-Prototyping-Methoden in der Praxis zu verbessern und potenzielle Anwender bei der Auswahl von Methoden und Techniken durch eine Systematik zu unterstützen. Diese Techniken ermögli...

In an organization more or less all business processes are interconnected forming a large network or ecosystem of related activities. To describe (model) such complex process systems a formal language must offer the possibility to structure the according models. It must allow to describe the environment of a considered process and illustrates its r...

(Business) Information systems become more and more complex due to an increase in the volume of data, but also due to more and more interconnected elements that all need to be orchestrated to perform as a uniform system. Correctly understanding and describing (business) processes, is one of the cornerstone foundations in the creation of almost all...

(Business) Information systems become more and more complex due to an increase in the volume of data, but also due to more and more interconnected elements that all need to be orchestrated to perform as a uniform system. Correctly understanding and describing (business) processes, is one of the cornerstone foundations in the creation of almost all...

Originally developed as a simple static computation tool (Simple Sim - SiSi), in this paper we describe the principle behind a pragmatic approach that is not only practical for simple calculation of lead times for process models in Abstract Layered PASS (ALPS), but also can serve as tool of structural soundness verification for the distributed and...

After the first general concept about using ontologies for the exchange of subject-oriented business process models in 2014, a concrete proposal for using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the semantic web technology framework as a concrete and direct means was made in 2017 including a proof of concept and proposal for a first standard. Based upo...

The use of prototyping techniques for development of services is an often proposed and praised approach, not least due to the success of prototyping in the development of physical products. The actual experience of the concepts in development is an integral experience that most often will improve development efforts substantially. Yet due to the in...

This article re-investigates the idea of using the semantic-web-technologies for formally describing subject-oriented process models. It proposes improvements to previous knowledge models for subject-oriented process description and discusses why process models should directly be described in the web-ontology language, instead of only using it as s...

This paper gives an overview about available S-BPM tools. These seven tools cover either modeling or execution aspects.

New ways for service development are necessary to optimize communication and decision-making. Service prototyping is the concept to experience services and make them tangible. Here we presents a tool (work in progress) for rapid service prototyping based on a virtual reality authoring system. The tool has two main features: first to create service...

In the sister paper to this work1 we proposed a method for using natural language text as the working basis of business process management efforts, especially incorporating the subject-oriented business process management and modeling (S-BPM) paradigm. The texts then would function as the basis to derive formal process models from. The methodology...

In this paper we present a method that describes what steps have to be performed in order to derive executable subject-oriented process models from natural language descriptions with the goal to simplify the information exchange between process practitioners and BPM experts. After laying down the necessary formal foundation and the proposed methodo...

Kurzfassung Service Prototyping dient primär dazu, Dienstleistungen im Entwicklungsstadium erlebbar zu machen. Das Projekt dimenSion strebt somit an, ein praxisorientiertes Verfahren bereitzustellen, das auch von KMU mit einem guten Aufwand/Nutzen-Verhältnis eingesetzt werden kann und den Erfolg entwickelter Dienstleistungen absichert. Durch den Ei...

In this paper we present a first draft for a concept of using abstract layers to extend the modeling capabilities of the subject-oriented graphical process-modeling language PASS. The concept is nonintrusive to existing PASS specification. It is argued how the Abstract Layered PASS (ALP) concept can be used to manage and integrate challenges and re...

In this paper we present a graphical editing concept to extend the capabilities of the subject-oriented process-modeling language PASS. The concept builds up on the arbitrator-pattern-inspired PASS-interpreter and clarifies its ad-hoc instance extension and exception handling mechanisms. The paper thereby proposes the arbitrator pattern as a possib...

This paper presents a concept for mappings that can be applied to form a Petri-Net-Graph from the information of a business process model created with the Parallel Activity Specification Schema (PASS). Furthermore the possible uses as well as the shortcomings of this approach are discussed. In the appendix a formal specification for such a converte...

Propädeutikum Java ist ein Einführungskurs in die Programmiersprache Java für Schüler und Abiturienten, die sich auf das Studium vorbereiten möchten. Die Autoren - erfahrene Dozenten, Übungsleiter und Tutoren am Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT) - ermöglichen Anfängern den Einstieg in die faszinierende Welt der Programmierung anhand einer V...

This paper presents the idea of using the Arbitrator Pattern, a concept from the field of robotics, and applying it to the domain of business process model interpretation, using it as a mechanism to allow dynamic adaption and extension of process instances at runtime. The idea is discussed and a formal specification is given using ASMs to detail th...

This paper discusses and proposes a few standard conventions or best practices in subject-oriented business process modeling with the Parallel Activity Specification Schema (PASS). It is derived from experiences gained at Metasonic as well as teaching experience for several seminar projects at an university. The ideas and concepts were derived as s...