The Service Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm aims at building complex systems by composing them from less complex systems, called services. Such a (complex) system is a distributed application often involving several cooperating enterprises. As a system is usually subject to change, individual services will be substituted by other services during the system's life-cycle. Substituting one service by another one should not affect the correctness of the overall system. Verification of correctness is challenging, as the overall system is usually not known to any of the involved enterprises. The focus of the BOSS project is to study service substitution for a set of practical relevant correctness notions. The project is funded by NWO.

The Software as a Service (SaaS) paradigm is particularly interesting for situations where many organizations need to support similar processes. Since there are 441 municipalities in the Netherlands and they are all providing similar services and are executing similar processes, the use of SaaS technology could potentially be very beneficial for these local governments. Therefore, the aim of the CoSeLoG project is to create a cloud infrastructure for municipalities. Such a cloud would offer services for handling various types of permits, taxes, certificates, and licences.

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Controlling Dynamic Real Life Workflow Situations with Demand Driven Workflow Systems This STW project aims at an innovative kind of workflow management systems the so-called Demand Driven Workflow Systems. These systems will be based on the well-founded theory of functional programming and Petri nets. This is a joint project with RUN.

The overall goal of EDImine is the analysis of inter-organizational business processes. Thereby, EDImine's approach extends innovative process mining techniques, which currently have a pure focus on processes within a company. The project delivers means for mining the messages exchanged between companies, discovering the inherent inter-organizational processes using process mining, extracting relevant information out of these processes and lifting the information to the business level. The overall objective is the analysis, the optimization, the forecast, as well as the monitoring of inter-organizational relationships from an economic as well as from a technical point of view.

Fluxicon is a spin-off of the process mining research done at TU/e. Two STW Valorisation Grants (Phase 1 & 2) have been granted to set up a process mining company that will develop easy-to-use process mining software.

Two important application fields of coordination are grid computing and workflow management. Grid computing is mostly used in computational science while workflow management is used for business applications. In this proposal we will try and bring the knowledge coming from these two areas together in order to make further progress in both of them. AIS is collaborating with CWI in this project. The application domain is process mining which requires grids to do large experiments.

Strengthening ICT Training and Research Capacity in the Four Public Universities in Uganda This Nuffic project is a collaboration with several universities in the Netherlands and Uganda. The contribution of AIS is mainly in the field of process mining and workflow management.

Providing Full Life Cycle Support for Adaptive Processes by Advanced Mining Approaches The NWO project “MinAdept” focuses on the interplay between adaptive process management (i.e., making information systems process-aware and flexible) and process mining (i.e., the analysis of event logs recorded by information systems). This research is motivated by the observation that increased flexibility triggers the need for better and more intelligent forms of monitoring.

(System adaptability in the domain of digital document printing systems) The Octopus project focuses on evolvability aspects of high-tech embedded systems. In particular, the project focuses on run-time evolvability, i.e. system adaptability. The aim of the project is to define new techniques, tools, and methods that help to design software-intensive electro/physical/chemical/mechanical systems, like professional printers, that react in an adaptive way to changes during usage. To realize an efficient design methodology for high quality data paths, including hardware and software mapping, of adaptive multi-functional printers and copiers, we will use (colored) Petri nets to model and analyze data paths. Océ is the main industry partner in this project.

For the Poseidon project, systems-of-systems in the domain of maritime safety and security will act as research driver and industrial reference frame. The contribution of AIS in the project focuses on the “Integration and Acceptance” subject and involves the following research topics: the connection of system components that use various protocols for interaction.and supporting the integration and acceptance workflow. Thales is the main industry partner in this project.

This Large-scale Integrating Project (IP) in FP7 aims to support policy and security configuration management in Future Internet (FI) applications. FI applications will see dynamic compositions of services providing a broad diversity of functions, starting with business functionality down to infrastructure services. PoSecCo (see http://www.posecco.eu) overcomes policy and security related problems by establishing a traceable and sustainable link between high-level requirements and low-level configuration settings. Operations will be supported by self-managed features and decision support systems. Substantial improvements are expected in the areas of policy modeling and conflict detection across architectural layers, decision support for policy refinement processes, policy and configuration change management including validation, remediation and audit support, and security management processes in FI application scenarios. PoSecCo addresses the economic viability of the chosen approach by assessing cost and organizational benefits of an improved policy and configuration management. TU/e’s contribution will be mainly in the area of process mining (www.processmining.org).

Process Mining using ProM (www.processmining.org) Process mining techniques attempt to extract non-trivial and useful information from so-called event logs”. One element of process mining is control-flow discovery, i.e., automatically constructing a process model (e.g., a Petri net) describing the causal dependencies between activities. ProM is an open source process mining tool. Its functionality is not limited to control-flow discovery. ProM also allows for the discovery of other perspectives (e.g., data and resources) and supports related techniques such as conformance checking, model extension, model transformation, verification, etc. This makes ProM a versatile tool for process analysis which is not restricted to model analysis but also includes log-based analysis.

Process Mining and Visualization in Healthcare The “Process Mining and Visualization in Healthcare” (ProMVisH) project aims at the application of process mining and process visualization in the healthcare domain.

The availability of process models and event logs is steadily increasing as more and more business processes are supported by IT. On the one hand, most organizations make substantial efforts to document their processes, while on the other hand, these processes leave footprints in their information systems. Although it is possible to extract event logs from today's systems, the relation between process models and event logs is seldom investigated. Yet, the availability of event logs on the one hand and models on the other hand enables conformance checking, i.e., investigating whether reality deviates from a priori defined models. This is useful for a variety of reasons, e.g., to show compliance or to improve process support. Moreover, the logs can be used to extend and repair process models. In particular, the process models may be automatically augmented with performance information showing, for example, bottlenecks. One can go even one step further and use historic information to predict the performance or compliance of running cases.

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Case Handling and Process Mining in WebSphere The project aims at extracting events from semi-structured processes in WebSphere and use this for process mining. This is a collaboration with IBM.

Workflow management using YAWL (www.yawl-system.com) YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language) is an original and sophisticated workflow language developed at AIS in collaboration with QUT's BPM research group. YAWL builds on the insights gained from the workflow patterns research and combines it with the powerful language of Petri-nets.

In 2010 the AIS Group has been evaluated at the national level. An international committee selected the AIS group as one of the strongest computer science research group of the Netherlands. The Research program, Quality, Productivity, Relevance, and Vitality and Feasibility of AIS were all given the highest score (5). Moreover, the committee indicated that AIS is probably the best BPM group world-wide.

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Process mining is een relatief nieuwe methode om bedrijsprocessen accuraat in beeld te brengen. Modellen worden automatisch gegenereerd op basis van daadwerkelijke gebeurtenissen, zoals die zijn geregistreerd in informatiesystemen. Het vakgebied is genoemd naar processmodellering en data mining, en is interessant voor wetenschap én commercie. De TU Eindhoven loopt voorop.

Het complete interview (door Karina Meerman, verschenen in I/O ICT-onderzoek, februari 2011)

2013 - 2012 - 2011 - 2010 - 2009 - 2008 - 2007 - 2006 - 2005

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