proView - Personalized and Updatable Process Visualizations

Project Description

The proView project develops a framework that enables stakeholders to interact with business process models based on personalized process views - a personalized process view abstracts a business process model in a stakeholder-centered way, e.g., by only displaying those activities the stakeholder is involved in. Such process abstraction not only increases model comprehensibility, but also foster model changes and evolution. Furthermore, the proView approach provides alternative process representations to stakeholders (e.g., process graphs, forms or trees) such that they can choose the one most favorable in their current working context. The overall goal is to assist stakeholders in understanding and adapting business processes they are involved in.
 

proVie

proView|Create enables powerful view creation functionality (click to see more)

 

proView|Update allows updating personalized process views (click to see more)

 

proView|Execute supports the execution of process views. (click to see more)

 

proView|Appearance provides alternativ process representations. (click to see more)

 

proView
Create

proView|Create addresses the stakeholder-specific creation of process views. For this purpose, well-defined elementary operations hiding and abstracting process elements (cf. Figure 1) are provided. Furthermore, these elementary operations can be combined in order to realize high-level view-creation operations. In turn, this enables stakeholders to create process views according to their specific needs. Furthermore, high-level operations can be used for creating context-sensitive process views, e.g., by only displaying those activities to a stakeholder at run-time, which have not been executed yet.

 

Fig. 1: Example of creating a process view

proView
Update

proView|Update enables stakeholders to update business process models based on their personalized process view through intuitive change operations (cf. Figure 2a). Updating and changing process models based on stakeholder-specific process view is required since stakeholders, usually have not IT background, and would have serious problems with understanding complex and large process models. Hence, it is hardly possible for them to introduce correct changes directly on these models, i.e., without the provision of any process model abstraction. Instead, personalized process views should be provided to stakeholders and updates of these abstracted process views be propagated to the process model.
Updates performed by stakeholders on their personalized process view will be propagated to the overall process model and afterwards to all associated process views (cf. Figure 2b+c). This ensures that, at each point in time, all stakeholders have a current version of the process.

Fig. 2: proView method to update process views

proView
Execute

proView|Execute allows for the execution of selected views on different Business Process Management Systems (BPMS). Run-time information is merged into a central process model and accordingly displayed in all associated process views (cf. Figure 3).

Fig. 3: Execution of process views

proView
Appearance

proView|Appearance provides a rich set of alternative process representations. These alternative process representations allows proView to visualize process views to stakeholders in a representation they are familiar with or they can easily understand. Examples of process representations includes process diagrams (e.g., EPCs, cf. Figure 4c) forms and trees (cf. Figure 4a+b) or well-etablished process notations like EPCs (cf. Figure 4c).

Fig. 4: Stakeholder-specific process view representations

Project Details

proView Demonstrator

Project Partners

Ulm University, Institute of Databases and Information Systems

Duration

The proView project has been running since 2011.

Additional Information

proView partially reuses results from the Proviado project.

Publications

Master & Bachelor Theses