Process Engineering (6 ECTS)

Description:

Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. BPM has become a strategic activity in all organizations around the world because of its potential to increase profit margins and reduce operating costs. This course aims at providing an overview of some key existing solutions for modelling and developing processes, while emphasizing and discussing open research problems in this area. More specifically, this course focuses on three main parts:

The first part (Process Modelling) introduces the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), which is the ISO standard graphical notation used for modelling business processes. This part also shows how to use existing frameworks (such as the bonita bpm) to support the development of BPMN processes along with their life-cycle (design, configuration, execution and control).
The second part (Process Mining) presents a family of techniques that support the analysis of business processes based on event logs. Process mining applies specialized data mining algorithms on event log data in order to identify trends and patterns contained in these event logs. Process mining aims at improving process efficiency and understanding of processes.
The third part (Process Analysis) introduces formal models for defining the semantics of process executions. These formal models allow the analysis of the processes using simulation and verification techniques for optimizing resource allocation or controlling the evolution of the business processes.

Program:

The course is balanced in practical exercices and theoretical content. A collaborative paper review is also proposed

Process Modelling (12h)

Introduction to Business Process Management (BPM)
Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN)
Process perspectives (collaborations and choreographies)
BPM life-cycle

Process Mining (9h)

Motivations & positioning of process mining
Types of process mining (discovery, conformance & enhancement)
Process mining methods & tools

Process Analysis (12h)

Formal models
Functional and quantitative analysis
Resource allocation
Process comparison and evolution