Empowering End-users to Support Knowledge-Intensive Processes with the Case Management Model and Notation

Next to the widespread use of workflow management solutions in practice, there are many business processes that are currently not adequately supported. These processes are often very data-driven, unstructured, unpredictable, and driven by user decisions. In the literature they are usually referred to as Knowledge-intensive Processes.

As a result the Object Management Group (OMG) has recently released the Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN). Simlar to BPMN for traditional business processes this standard provides a visual notation and the operational semantics for knowledge intensive processes. The following figure shows an example diagramm in the CMMN notation: 

Throughout the course of this master's thesis, the CMMN specification will be analyzed thoroughly in order to evaluate, whether it can support Knowledge-workers with their problems, which are often very complex and unique.

The main goal is to use the insights gained throughout this analysis to implement a subset of this notation in an existing research prototype. This includes an analysis of advantages and disadvantages of the CMMN specification as well as the selection of a subset that will be implemented based on existing workflow patterns and requirements for process modeling.

(Initial selection of) References:

• Aalst, W.M.P. van der, Weske, M.: Case Handling: a new paradigm for business process support. Data & Knowledge Engineering. 53(2). 129-162, 2005
• Davenport, Th. H. and Nohria, N., Case Management and the Integration of Labor, Sloan Management Review, 1994.
• Davenport, Th. H, Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers, HarvardBusinessSchool Press, 2005.
• Hull, R., Damaggio, E., Fournier, F., Gupta, M., Heath III, F.T., Hobson, S., Linehan, M., Maradugu, S., Nigam, A., Sukaviriya, P., and Vaculin, R., Introducing the Guard-Stage-Milestone Approach for Specifying Business Entity Lifecycles. Proceedings of the 7th International conference on Web Services and Formal Methods (WS-FM 2010). Bravetti, M., and Bultan, T. (eds.). Springer-Verlag, Berling, Heidelberg, 1-24. 2010.
• Hull, R. et. al., Business artifacts with guard-stage-milestone lifecycles: Managing artifact interactions with conditions and events. Proceedings of the 5th ACM Intl. Conf. on Distributed Event-based Systems (DEBS), pages 51–62, New York, NY, USA, 2011.
• Man, H. de, Case Management: A Review of Modeling Approaches, BPTrends, January 2009