Course Description

The target group are students on MSc level with a background in computer science and with a special focus on software engineering, system planning, business automation. The BPA-course combines the disciplines of business process re-engineering (BPR) and service-oriented computing (SOC) to achieve an automation with the help of Internet technologies.

We define BPR as a fundamental reconsideration and radical restructuring of business processes in order to achieve drastic improvements in costs, quality and service. Here, a business process is one focused upon the production of particular products that may either be physical (such as a truck or bridge), or intangible (such as a design or damage assessment for an insurance case), or a mix of intangible with physical elements.

We define SOC as a computer-science discipline that uses web services for developing loosely coupled applications where inter-system dependency is minimized. SOC relies on the technology stack of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) with the core layers XML, SOAP, and HTTP. For the purpose of BPA, we include WS-* languages in SOA, most notably BPEL.

Course Content

Fundamental skills must be acquired during the course for carrying out the exercises and passing the final exam:

• Understanding the importance of business process management within companies;
• Modeling of business processes with different notations;
• Re-engineering business processes from a current state towards a target state, e.g., tackling bottlenecks and better workload distribution, faster completion time;
• Patterns application for different business-process perspectives, i.e., control-flow, data-flow, organizational resources.
• Checking of business processes for formal correctness properties, e.g., soundness, boundedness and safeness, invariance, correct termination;
• Automating re-engineered business processes: with SOC technologies, e.g., specification in SOA and WS-*, using specific SOC setup and enactment applications;

Course Organization

The students will have to complete a running example with the following sequence:

• Find a business process case out of which a business process is extracted with at least one and-split, one or-split. and at least 20 nodes.
• Specify abusiness process in accordance with workflow-net formalism, verify it for control-flow correctness, assign resources to the process, check the business process for performance issues like bottlenecks.
• Reengineer the business process with patterns.
• Enact the business process with YAWL¹ and in a different specification in ActiveBPEL².