Abstract
Nowadays organizations are experimenting a drift on the way processes are managed. On the one hand, formal notations like Petri nets or Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) enable the unambiguous reasoning and automation of designed processes. This way of eliciting processes by manual design, which stemmed decades ago, will still be an important actor in the future. On the other hand, regulations require organizations to store their process executions in structured representations, so that they are known and can be analyzed. Finally, due to the different nature of stakeholders within an organization (ranging from the most technical members, e.g., developers, to less technical), textual descriptions of processes are also maintained to enable that everyone in the organization understands their processes.
In this paper I will describe techniques for facilitating the interconnection between these three process representations. This requires interdisciplinary research to connect several fields: business process management, formal methods, natural language processing and process mining.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank to the organization of the Petri Nets and ACSD conferences for both the invitation to give a keynote and to write an article in the conference proceedings.
I would like to thank some researchers that collaborate with my group on some of the topics of this paper: Han van der Aa, Andrea Burattin, Thomas Chatain, Boudewijn van Dongen, Henrik Leopold, Hajo A. Reijers and Barbara Weber. Likewise, I would like to thank the local collaborators LLuís Padró, Josep Sànchez-Ferreres, David Sanchez-Charles and Farbod Taymouri.
This work has been partially supported by funds from the Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), the European Union (FEDER funds) under grant COMMAS (ref. TIN2013-46181-C2-1-R).
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Carmona, J. (2017). The Alignment of Formal, Structured and Unstructured Process Descriptions. In: van der Aalst, W., Best, E. (eds) Application and Theory of Petri Nets and Concurrency. PETRI NETS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10258. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57861-3_1
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