From event streams to process models and back: Challenges and opportunities

Abstract

The domains of complex event processing (CEP) and business process management (BPM) have different origins but for many aspects draw on similar concepts. While specific combinations of BPM and CEP have attracted research attention, resulting in solutions to specific problems, we attempt to take a broad view at the opportunities and challenges involved. We first illustrate these by a detailed example from the logistics domain. We then propose a mapping of this area into four quadrants -two quadrants drawing from CEP to create or extend process models and two quadrants starting $ This paper is an outcome of discussions and collaborations that were initiated at the Dagstuhl seminar 16341 on "Integrating Process-Oriented and Event-Based Systems" from a process model to address how it can guide CEP. Existing literature is reviewed and specific challenges and opportunities are indicated for each of these quadrants. Based on this mapping, we identify challenges and opportunities that recur across quadrants and can be considered as the core issues of this combination. We suggest that addressing these issues in a generic manner would form a sound basis for future applications and advance this area significantly.

Challenges and Architectural Approaches for Automotive PLM in Multi-Brand Organisations - A Discussion Paper

“…Based on this, we advocate a CEP-based approach to address the challenges by supporting both, and present first steps towards such an approach (Section 4). As next steps on the way to such an approach we see the following research tasks: In order to identify the different abstraction levels of a process required to define event patterns, it is necessary to collect and incorporate expert domain knowledge (Soffer et al, 2017). This knowledge about different steps and iterations to take, about intermediate or end results and process documentation is important in order to derive concepts for a CEP approach based on Use-Cases.…”

“…This matches (Opiela et al, 2016, p. 19)'s evaluation of CEP technology to have a high potential for the future (figure 3b). While CEP is an area of active research (see e.g., (Krumeich et al, 2014;Flouris et al, 2016;Soffer et al, 2017;Dayarathna and Perera, 2018)), its standardization concerning definitions, data formats and interfaces is still at an early stage. While current research findings indicate that the event processing industry will continue to have a significant growth over the next decade (Dayarathna and Perera, 2018), it is important to gain industry-related and domain-specific experiences, especially with a larger number of heterogeneous sources of information (Krumeich et al, 2014).…”

IoT meets BPM: a bidirectional communication architecture for IoT-aware process execution

“…Complex event processing-based method The most elaborate approach to bridge this gap is to make use of complex event processing methods [17]. Here, the simple conditionbased method is replaced by a more complex technique where we look at recorded IoT data in more detail.…”

“…The work presented in [17] lists and reviews specific challenges and opportunities to combine BPM and complex event processing (CEP) technology. These challenges are consid-ered as the core issues of this combination.…”

“…In the literature, several concepts are emerging on combining IoT and BPM, e.g., monitoring running processes to align them with the state of physical devices and objects [12][13][14][15]. Still, there are many open challenges to be tackled [16][17][18]. In particular, the exploitation of IoT technology for system supported process execution is constrained by the absence of a common architecture that manages and standardizes the communication between both worlds.…”