There is an EU Project proposal to look at Event-driven Business Process Management, and that drove the title and interest in this panel (following neatly on from the edBPM09 workshop a few weeks back) chaired by CITT’s Rainer von Ammon.

The brief for the panel was to cover particular aspects of  “edBPM” such as:

• What is meant by edBPM? Compared with, for example, the “edBPM  Reference Model” presented at the 1st EPTS symposium in 2006?
  • TIBCO of course talks about “edBPM” as either a part of “BPM+” (from a BPM perspective) or as automated rule- and event-driven processes (from a CEP perspective). Either way, customers regularly combine complex event processing and (orchestrated, BPMN-based) workflow as well as (orchestrated, XML processing) SOA.
  • The main issues with the supplied edBPM model was that it simply combined event processing with BPEL processes. TIBCO’s edBPM customers invariably never use BPEL (why should they?), and indeed some don’t use BPMN for process models (defining models in terms of states and rules). So the main suggestion here is to go up a level in abstraction:
    • Multiple engines (that could include BPEL if you were so hindered inclined) as well as event processing algorithms or even analytics.
    • An event server (or bus).
    • Some kind of generic state store (for process states, persisted events, etc).
    • More generic models (for business control) and dashboards (cockpit or otherwise).
• Who will be the first “market mover” in exploiting the term “edBPM”?
  • This might have been disappointing to the edBPM pundits, but the vendors basically agreed that this term had no formal “legs” yet: no one had a marketing campaign around event driven BPM, no one had tried to persuade an analyst to take up (or define) the term, and the large BPM vendor and consultant community would not want their “BPM” mindshare asset diluted.
• Do we need new/enhanced standards for edBPM? And what is the challenge to insert/combine Complex Events in BPM? Versus say an example model for non-deterministic approaches like Smart Fraud Management in Banking?
  • The new BPMN2 standard has started the process of adding interesting event extensions to BPMN, while there are existing standards for other models (PRR for production rules, UML State for entity lifecycles, BMM for motivations, PMML for analytics, the proposed DMN for decision models, and so forth).
  • The Fraud example shows how some existing fraud products might work, but again is too specific - what if other event pattern detection and event pattern discovery techniques are desired?
• Related to the above point was the proposal for new standards at the domain level for edBPM…
  • “The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from” comes to mind here: effort would be better spent event-enabling the existing standards (what are the relevant loads and what combinations of the domain data models are relevant as payloads?)…
• Although the panel did not progress to the next question, it is interesting nontheless: what is required to set up edBPM projects and/or what aspects of edBPM need to be researched further?
  • Probably there is some methodology work to be done on when to use processes, rules/queries or states and how to combine them…
  • Areas of outstanding research in edBPM are probably joint semantics (a.k.a. the promise of BPDM) across different process types (including CEP), CEP-enabled BPMN, and mergers of event operations with (some aspect of the voluminous domain of) the SOA service standards.

The original CITT proposal can be found at http://www.citt-online.com/downloads/EDBPM-IP-proposal.ppt .

BPM circa 1910

… was a full (if small) classroom at Ulm Universitat in S Germany this week, as part of BPM2009 - not normal CEP territory of course. Besides the TIBCO keynote (covering, of course,  the various synergies between event and rule processing in high-performance and dynamic BPM), there were several papers presented on the general area of event-driven BPM.

One of the interesting observations was that 2 of the papers were about Aris’ Event Process Chain and its relationship to BPEL. Now, EPC is a (non standard) model notation at a slightly higher abstraction level than BPMN. And of course, BPMN / process orchestrations are event driven but hardly model the events as first-class citizens (as an exercise, take any reasonable BPMN diagram, shrink the activity task boxes and enlarge the event circles, and observe the effect). And of course, BPEL is not normally considered anything special for event processing. In my humble opinion there is much more of interest to edBPM than just simple event processing and BPEL!

For more on BPM2009, check out Sandy Kemsley’s blog. Meanwhile, I’ll be trying to keep out of the way of the Porsches tearing up the autobahn…

… is the title for the replacement to (and presumed superset of) the Case Management OMG specification proposal, per this report from OMG task force co-chair Fred Cummins, albeit within the interesting context of advanced healthcare IT [*1].

Very relevant to the knowledge-driven medical domain (and to case management) is the ability to respond to events (as in event-driven or event-based processes) - events provide new information that extend both the current patient and medical condition knowledgebases, for example. Out-of-sequence and disruptive events need to be handled, and medical deductions and conclusions can certainly be defined as “complex events” (i.e. aggregations and combinations of prior events) … probably with the addition of some probability factor!

Also very relevant is that inference rules are one of the more useful knowledge representation mechanisms - used both in formal logic as well as business rule engines - making rule-driven processes truly declarative, ad hoc and dynamic. Event-driven and rule-driven processes are both areas covered by CEP technologies like TIBCO BusinessEvents. And in OMG inference rules are covered by the PRR extension to UML.

On the other hand, the term “knowledge-driven” [*2] can cover a number of things beyond “event-driven business processes” and “rule-driven business processes”. For example, events can be viewed as documentable and classifiable constructs for use in ontologies (like OWL), and rules can be followed by medical staff, such as via checklists or flowcharts. There is also the domain of “knowledge management” in the form of content or document management  - probably ideal for case note recordings.

Fred’s comments include:

“Knowledge-driven processes for treatment of medical conditions will support intuitive medicine with improved tracking and record-keeping while supporting performance measurement and encoding of insights to improve and streamline practices.” Whenever I read “tracking” and “performance measurement” I think of event tracking and concepts like “track and trace”. When I  read “encoding of insights” I see “situation awareness”. Note these are both key complex event processing indicators!

“Specifications of activities can easily be changed to introduce new technology or to provide guidance in the use of certain procedures or medications. More precise processes can be incorporated using conventional business process modeling technology, but processes can still be adjusted to deal with unforeseen circumstances.” I’m pretty sure Fred doesn’t mean to imply ad hoc processes are imprecise, but in fact may be selected or defined according to current knowledge. Knowledge representation in automated systems usually involves rules - and event-driven rules are typical of CEP technology.

“Both intuitive and precise processes can be interwoven and evolved as improved techniques that are discovered or developed.” This means ad-hoc processes mixing manual and automated processing. Most medical processes involve a health-practitioner-in-the-loop, so this makes perfect sense.

In my humble opinion, knowledge-driven processes (including medical processes), and their associated models, are a very interesting area, with much overlap with the state-of-the-art rule-driven CEP world. Whether there is enough concensus for a standardization effort yet, given (1) only 2 vendors responded to the preceding OMG RFI on “dynamic process activity modeling” and (2) “knowledge-driven process” is such a new term it doesn’t even have an entry on Wikipedia yet (!), is open to debate… which no doubt will occur at the next OMG meeting.

Notes:

[1] Interestingly, advanced medical healthcare support is one of the first use cases in the EPTS Use Cases Working Group.

[2] Possibly the proposed standard is simply misnamed. For example a better fit might be the moniker “Ad hoc Process Modeling” (or somesuch) that would avoid any contentious issues around “knowledge” coverage and representation.