I would like to welcome A/Prof Karim Baina and his phd student miss Soumaya Slimani from ENSIAS (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Informatique et d’Analyse des Systèmes) in Rabat, Morocco to DSV.
Karim and Soumaya will stay with us for the next three weeks. Among others they will participate in my course in business process management which starts next week. The visit is financed by SIDA and VR (The Swedish Research Council) through our MENA project.

During their stay, Karim will be sitting in office 7426 and Soumaya in 7427. Please feel free to contact them.

The YAWL book, i.e. the book Modern Business Process Automation: YAWL and its Support Environment
is now published.

The book is the result from a cooperation in which several universities have been involved (seven universities and one center). The leadership has been shared by Prof. Arthur ter Hofstede (QUT) and Wil van der Aalst (TUE), who together with Dr. Michael Adams and Dr. Nick Russell are editors of the book.

Prof. Paul Johannesson and Birger Andersson and myself contributed with chapter 16 of the book. Together with Dr.Chun Ouyang (QUT) and Prof. Marlon Dumas (UT), I was also involved in the work of chapter 15. (We did some of this work during Chun’s visit at DSV)

The book was written as a teaching book and includes a large number of exercises. As a teaching means we also developed extensive presentation-material. The book is highly relevant for our BPM courses and I am considering it as a candidate for course book for the BPDI (Business Process Design and Intelligence) course next year.

I received a copy of the book from my colleagues at QUT. The photo is from my visit at QUT in February 2010.

In February 2010 I visited the BPM group at QUT for three weeks. Together with Prof. Arthur ter Hofstede and Dr. Marcello la Rosa, I am working on collecting and systematizing patterns for dealing with process models complexity. It is a continuation of the work we initiated during my visit to QUT last summer. The planned outcome of this cooperation is a conference paper, which we hope to be able to complete at the end of this month.

A new milestone in the ÖST project is reached. The prototyping of the emergency phone service in YAWL is now completed.

The work with the prototype was mainly carried out during October-November and David Truffet’s visit at DSV.

The prototype is developed in YAWL. It demonstrates how a workflow/business process management system can be used as a back-end system for implementing web-services. The film here shows the execution of a case in the system, i.e. how a citizen submits an application for emergency phone service to a municipality in Sweden and how the application is handled by the local government. The recording is in Swedish. A translation to English will be offered soon.

The prototype will be released for testing in the beginning of January 2010.

The process analysis for the e-service was carried out at Järfälla municipality during spring with help of Gustaf Juell-Skielse.

Thank you David for your work with the prototype. Thank you Gustaf for your cooperation since the beginning of the project.

Marry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

During November 2009 David Truffet visited the Information Systems laboratory at DSV for four weeks. David completed his PhD at University of Queensland (UQ) in Brisbane some years ago and has worked since this with projects at the local government in Australia. I met him when visiting the BPM group at QUT last July. We were then working om similar problems: myself, on the emergency phone application process implementation in YAWL for the ÖST project and David was working on a process implementation for a local case study. David let me use his solutions and code and I invited him to DSV to help completing the prototype we are developing for the ÖST project.

During David’s visit we worked on
– improving the process implementation in YAWL
– implementing customized jsp forms for the process
– e-mail notifications for tasks and web-interface for task completion (so that the workflow management system used to manage the process remains invisible for the users)

In addition David also
– added multilingual functionality to the solution
– worked on accessibility issues so that the prototype complies with EU’s web accessibility policy.

The prototype is almost ready now and I am looking forward to release it soon.

Thanks for your visit David and for the four fruitful weeks spent here!

Recently I returned from a two months long visit at the BPM group at QUT in Brisbane, Australia.

During the time at QUT:

• I worked on the YAWL-demo for the ÖST-project, implementing the emergency telephone application and installation process. I implemented a couple of customs forms for the demo and used code written by David Truffet in doing this, as well as David’s wonderful help. Thank you David!
• I started working in the area of large process models, where I am cooperating with Marcello La Rosa and Arthur ter Hofstede.
• I produced lecture slides for the YAWL book chapter on open source workflow systems (Chapter 16). Paul and Birger, who are co-authors of the chapter, helped me with the slides.

Many thanks to the BPM group and QUT for their hospitality.

Today, Paul, Birger, Martin and I submitted a project application to the Swedish Research Council.

Abstract:
Software support for well structured business processes is today provided through workflow technology
and process management tools. Tailored to support well structured processes, these tools do not provide
adequate support for loosely structured work activities such as knowledge intensive processes. This type of work
is heavily reliant on professional knowledge, deals with large amounts of data and tasks that can be redone several
times. The purpose of the project is to bring together state-of-the-art research in business process management
systems and social software to design services and methodology for supporting loosely structured processes. This
architecture will enable flexible process enactment, configurable and context-aware user interfaces, and service
based task support.

VR09-ProjectDescription.pdf
VR09-PopularDescription.pdf

Last week Dr. Chun Ouyang from the BPM group at QUT visited us. She used the opportunity to stop over in Stockholm after her conference trip to the 6th IEEE European Conferecne on Web Services held 12-14 November in Dublin.

Chun is known for her work on mapping BPMN to BPEL and BPEL to Petri nets. Recently Chun has been involved in the implementation of YAWL4Film. YAWL4Film is an extension of YAWL for supporting the film production process in the film industry in Australia. At DSV Chun gave a very interesting and inspiring presentation of this work. More about it can be read here.
Chun’s visit is a continuation of our cooperation with the BPM group at QUT, which I regularly visit (latest in July-August 2008).

During Chun’s one week stay at DSV we worked on:
– Migration of YAWL4Film and the Conference case to the new release of YAWL, YAWL 2.0
– A new project proposal at QUT, which will be related to our project proposal on Service Oriented Architecture for Knowledge Intensive Processes– The book chapters for the YAWL book in which we are involved.

Thanks for your visit Chun!