My current research interests focus on the areas of workflow and electronic services.

Cost-Aware Business Process Management

DP120101624 ARC Discovery Grant 

Arthur ter Hofstede
Michael Rosemann
Moe Wynn
Michael Adams
Chun Ouyang
Zahirul Hoque (La Trobe University)
Wil van der Aalst (Partner Investigator)
Hajo Reijers (Partner Investigator)

Budget: AUD$320,000
Period: 2012-2014

Summary:   The project aims to inform the field of business process management (BPM) with the latest insights from the field of management accounting in order to make BPM systems cost-aware. By incorporating the cost dimension in BPM systems, organisations can obtain a more accurate and immediate overview of the true cost of their processes, make cost-informed decisions, and use this as a basis for dynamic process improvement. The project will use sound theoretical foundations and empirical evaluations to deliver techniques, tools and practices for managing cost aspects of business processes. These outcomes will have broad applicability and uptake in a wide range of industries.

Risk-Aware Business Process Management

DP110100091 ARC Discovery Grant 

Arthur ter Hofstede
Michael Rosemann
Colin Fidge
Moe Wynn
Marcello La Rosa
Michael Adams
Chun Ouyang
Wil van der Aalst (Partner Investigator)

Budget: AUD$450,000
Period: 2011-2013

Summary:   This project will unify the fields of risk management and business process management, providing a conceptual foundation for risk-aware business processes and defining best practices in their design and deployment. This first-time integration of risk and process management will lead to profound impact in an important area, as recent risk control and process failures show (e.g., NAB trading scandal, Heathrow Terminal 5). The project will use sound theoretical foundations and empirical evaluations to deliver a range of techniques, tools and practices for recognising and managing risk in business processes. These outcomes will have broad applicability and uptake in a wide range of industries.

Facilitating Business Process Standardisation and Reuse

LP110100252 ARC Linkage Grant 

Marcello La Rosa
Jan Recker
Arthur ter Hofstede
Michael Rosemann
Jamie Cornes (Partner Investigator)

Budget: AUD$210,000
Period: 2011-2013

Summary:   Business Process Management (BPM) is a recognised number one priority for Australian organisations. Successful BPM relies on the existence of advanced repositories providing access to graphical process models. However, current solutions have severe limitations in terms of reuse and standardisation of best process practices. This project will a) develop and validate an innovative, open-source platform to support the reuse and standardisation of best process practices, and b) specify appropriate governance structures for its use. The application of this solution in the challenging context of one of Australia's largest insurance providers will lead to a robust and scalable contribution to one of the most pressing management challenges.

Sustainable Built Environment National Research Centre

Our work is focussed on the application of Business Process Management to construction management. The centre's home page can be found here

Smart Services CRC

Our work is focussed on management of large process model repositories. The CRC's home page can be found here

NICTA

This collaboration with NICTA is in the area of business process management.

Workflow Patterns and Beyond

The research on workflow patterns has been applied in evaluating web service composition standards such as BPML and BPWEL4WS. This work has also been used in an analysis of UML activity diagrams (both versions 1.4 and 2.0), BML, a language used for Enterprise Application Integration, and BPMN, a proposed notation for business process modelling. In the context of the BABEL project, the patterns have been extended for the data and the resource perspectives. In addition, research has been conducted into exception handling patterns and into coupling patterns. More recently, a patterns-based evaluation of three scientific workflow management systems has been conducted and a collection of patterns for managing complexity in process models has been proposed.

The YAWL Initiative

The workflow patterns have given rise to YAWL: Yet Another Workflow Language, a powerful workflow language with a formal syntax and a formal semantics. The support environment for YAWL is an open source project, supported by industry partners, and a number of releases have been made available for download.

The Apromore Initiative

The Apromore Initiative is concerned with the development of an open source environment to support large process model repositories. This includes functionality such as version management, merging, and similarity search.