In September 2012, DBIS has successfully started a collaboration with  Prof. Carlo Combi's research group from the University of Verona, Italy. In this context, Prof. Manfred Reichert and Andreas Lanz stayed in Carlo's research group for several days in September. Together with Carlo Combi's team, DBIS wants to develop innovative concepts and algorithms for the controlled and flexible execution, monitoring and control of time-aware business processes within process-aware information systems. 

With this international research collaboration, DBIS further strengthens its research activities on the support of temporal aspects in information systems, which we started in the ATAPIS project a year ago. Temporal aspects play a crucial role in today's business life: delivery times, appointments, and statutory deadlines must be met, processing times and activity durations be monitored, and overall economic goals be pursued. Hence, in our fast pacing world, in which even small delays might cause severe problems, it will be more and more crucial for any company to be aware of the temporal properties of their business processes and to control and monitor them in an efficient and effective way. Contemporary process-aware information systems (PAISs), however, lack a comprehensive support of the temporal perspective, which restricts their practical applicability significantly.