In the context of the 22nd Int’l Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE'10), which took place from 7^th to 11^th of June 2010 in Hammamet, Tunisia, DBIS successfully presented three new research developments of its software lab to the international audience. With about 300 participants, CAISE’10 is one of the most distinguished specialized forums for world-class researchers in information systems engineering.

In the following we give a short overview of the three software presentations given by DBIS team members.

Demo 1: Error Handling in the AristaFlow BPM Suite.

Process-aware information systems will be not accepted by users if rigidity or idleness due to failures comes with them. When implementing business processes based on process management technology one fundamental goal is to ensure robustness of the realized process-aware information system. Meeting this goal becomes extremely complicated if high exibility demands need to be fulfilled. In this software demonstration DBIS showed how the AristaFlow BPM Suite assists process participants in coping with errors and exceptional situations. In particular, we focused on new error handling procedures and capabilities using the flexibility provided by ad-hoc changes not shown in other context so far.

Backgrounds. The AristaFlow BPM Suite provides an innovative and flexible process management technology, which enables quick and error-safe development of robust process-aware information systems. Furthermore, AristaFlow BPM Suite sets new standards in respect to flexible process execution during runtime. The AristaFlow technology has had its roots in several research projects (e.g., ADEPT1, ADEPT2 and AristaFlow) of our institute. In the meantime, the AristaFlow BPM Suite is further enhanced and distributed by a spin-off - the AristaFlow GmbH.

Demo 2: SeaFlows Toolset - Compliance Verification Made Easy.

In the light of an increasing demand on business process compliance, the verification of process models against compliance rules has become essential in enterprise computing. The SeaFlows Toolset featured in this tool demonstration extends process-aware information system by compliance checking functionality. It provides a user-friendly environment for modeling compliance rules using a graph-based formalism. Modeled compliance rules can be used to enrich process models. To address a multitude of verification settings, SeaFlows Toolset provides two compliance checking components: The structural compliance checker derives structural criteria from compliance rules and applies them to detect incompliance.
The data-aware compliance checker addresses the state explosion problem that can occur when the data dimension is explored during compliance checking. It performs context-sensitive automatic abstraction to derive an abstract process model which is more compact with regard to the data dimension enabling more efficient compliance checking. Altogether, SeaFlows Toolset constitutes a comprehensive and extensible framework for checking compliance of process models.

Backgrounds. The presented software tool has been developed in the SeaFlows project which targets at a comprehensive framework enabling process management systems to support semantic constraints at different levels.

Demo 3: Managing Processes on Mobile Devices: The MARPLE Approach.

Ubiquitous Computing is considered as enabler for linking everyday life with information and communication technology. However, developing pervasive applications that provide personalized user assistance is still a challenge. Relevant scenarios are diverse and encompass domains like healthcare, logistics, and business collaboration. Two of the technologies that show increasing maturity in respect to the demands of such applications are light-weight frameworks and process engines for mobile computing. Their fusion, however, is in a rather premature state. Generally, the support of mobile collaboration using a process engine raises challenging issues that need to be addressed. In the MARPLE project we target at a tight integration of process management technology with mobile computing frameworks in order to enable mobile process support in the aforementioned scenarios. In our software presentation we gave insights into the MARPLE architecture and its components. In particular, we introduced the MARPLE process engine which enables light-weight as well as flexible process support on mobile devices.

Backgrounds. The showcased software tool has been developed in the MARPLE research project. Research goal of MARPLE is to enable a tight integration of process management technology and mobile computing. Our overall vision is to provide sophisticated mobile process support; i.e., to realize generic process management features on mobile devices including support for process changes, migration of process instances between mobile devices, process enactment, and process monitoring. We base our work on core design principles and concepts we developed in our ADEPT project.