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Batch activity: enhancing business process modeling and enactment with batch processing

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Abstract

Organizations strive for efficiency in their business processes by process improvement and automation. Business process management (BPM) supports these efforts by capturing business processes in process models serving as blueprint for a number of process instances. In BPM, process instances are typically considered running independently of each other. However, batch processing–the collectively execution of several instances at specific process activities—is a common phenomenon in operational processes to reduce cost or time. Currently, batch processing is organized manually or hard-coded in software. For allowing stakeholders to explicitly represent their batch configurations in process models and their automatic execution, this paper provides a concept for batch activities and describes the corresponding execution semantics. The batch activity concept is evaluated in a two-step approach: a prototypical implementation in an existing BPM System proves its feasibility. Additionally, batch activities are applied to different use cases in a simulated environment. Its application implies cost-savings when a suitable batch configuration is selected. The batch activity concept contributes to practice by allowing the specification of batch work in process models and their automatic execution, and to research by extending the existing process modeling concepts.

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Notes

  1. Some BPMS providers, e.g., the Process Maker, allow to manually create batches during process execution in the user interface [13]. Since no support exists to configure batch processing in the process model, it is also mainly driven by the users at run time.

  2. This scenario was elicited from an expert interview with a German Retailing Company and an entry in forum of a BPMS provider [14].

  3. A work item realizes the link between a to-be executed activity instance and its task performer [1]. A batch work item is a consolidation of several instances into one work item.

  4. The simulation files, the activity event logs and the calculation are available at http://bpt.hpi.uni-potsdam.de/Public/BatchProcessing.

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  1. Hasso Plattner Institute, Digital Engineering Faculty, University of Potsdam, Prof.-Dr.-Helmert-Str. 2-3, 14482, Potsdam, Germany

    Luise Pufahl & Mathias Weske

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  1. Luise Pufahl
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  2. Mathias Weske
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Correspondence to Luise Pufahl.

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Pufahl, L., Weske, M. Batch activity: enhancing business process modeling and enactment with batch processing. Computing 101, 1909–1933 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00607-019-00717-4

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