Temporal aspects play a crucial role in today's business processes. Delivery times, appointments and deadlines must be met, processing times and durations be monitored, and optimization objectives shall be pursued. Unfortunately, contemporary process-aware information systems (PAISs) - the go-to solution for the computer-aided support of business processes - still lack a sophisticated support of the time perspective, significantly restricting their applicability in practice. Hence, there is a high demand for a more profound support of temporal aspects in PAIS.
To address this gap, this thesis proposes the ATAPIS framework for supporting the time perspective of business processes in PAIS. First, a universal and comprehensive set of time patterns is presented. Respective time patterns represent temporal concepts commonly found in business processes and are based on empirical evidence. Moreover, a precise formal semantics for each of the time patterns is provided. Respective formal semantics enable the proper integration of the time patterns into PAIS allowing for the specification of time-aware process schemas. On this basis, a generic framework for implementing the time patterns is discussed. The framework and its techniques enable the verification of time-aware process schemas regarding their temporal consistency, i.e., their ability to be successfully executed without violating any of their temporal constraints. The framework particularly pays attention to the contingent nature of activity durations as well as alternative execution paths. Subsequently, an algorithm as well as techniques for executing and monitoring time-aware process instances in PAIS is provided. Finally, a set of change operations for dynamically modifying time-aware process instances during run time is suggested. To reduce the complexity involved when applying multiple change operations a sophisticated approximation-based technique is presented.
Altogether, the ATAPIS framework provides fundamental concepts, techniques and algorithms for integrating the time perspective into PAIS. As beauty of this framework the specification, execution and evolution of business processes is supported by an integrated approach.