Dr Moe Thandar Kyaw Wynn [Research]

Researcher profile

I am a senior lecturer within the Information Systems Discipline in the Faculty of Science and Technology at Queensland University of Technology. I am an active researcher within the YAWL research initiative as a part of the Business Process Management (BPM) research group focusing on research topics concerning business process automation. I completed my PhD studies in the area of workflows with cancellation regions and OR-joins in Nov 2006.

Please go to Publications page for a list of my publications. Some of my publications (full-text) are also available from QUT e-prints archive. Some citations to my work can be found on Google Scholar.

Research interests

Business process modelling and automation
Business process analytics (simulation, monitoring, mining)
Workflow patterns and Yet Another Workflow Language
Risk-aware business process management
Cost-aware business process management
Web services and service oriented architectures
Petri nets and Reset nets

Students interested in carrying out research in these areas as an honours, master, or PhD project can contact me via email.

Research grants

Awarded a National ICT Australia Grant for a PhD scholarship on process compliance (2010 - 2012)

PhD research

My PhD research was carried out under the guidance of Dr. David Edmond, Prof. Arthur ter Hofstede and Prof. Wil van der Aalst.

Thesis Download: Moe Thandar Kyaw Wynn, Semantics, Verification, and Implementation of Workflows with Cancellation Regions and OR-joins, Queensland University of Technology, Nov 2006. (PDF, 9.18MB)
More information regarding the OR-join semantics and verification for YAWL can be found on the YAWL foundation website.

Research projects

Cost-aware Business Process Management (2010 - )

I am the lead researcher in this innovative research project to investigate the interrelationship between cost (environmental and economic) measures and business process activities. We propose to bring together insights from business and workflow communities to develop a sophisticated cost-aware business process management solution. Our aim is to develop a process-based approach to the management of environmental and economic costs of business activities by making workflow systems cost-aware. The outcomes of this research will enable businesses to make operational and strategic decisions with confidence based on accurate and real-time true cost information about its operations. We are looking at applying our findings in various domains, including rural industries, finance, health, utilities. Organisations interested in participating in this research project are welcomed to contact me via email.

YAWL research initiative (2004 - )

I am closely involved in the YAWL initiative headed by Professor Arthur ter Hofstede and Professor Wil van der Aalst. The YAWL initiative reflects a long-running collaborative research effort between Eindhoven University of Technology and the BPM group. The work is the result of earlier research collaborations on the workflow patterns where the control flow requirements of commercial workflow systems are studied in detail (http://www.workflowpatterns.com).

The finding from my PhD research directly influences the semantics of the YAWL language.

After careful analysis, I proposed a new formal semantics for the OR-join construct in the YAWL language together with an algorithmic approach. My finding on the OR-join semantics represents a substantial contribution to the field. I also implemented the algorithm and integrated it within the YAWL workflow engine (version beta 4 onwards).

My other significant contribution to the YAWL initiative is the proposal of new analysis techniques for YAWL workflows. The benefits include improved quality for workflows as well as significant time and cost savings due to detecting errors in advance. I have implemented this approach and integrated the code within the YAWL editor (version 1.3 onwards).

My third technical contribution is in the area of reduction rules. The proposed reduction rules for reset nets represent a contribution to the body of theory on reset nets. Moreover, YAWL reduction rules assist in managing the complexity associated with the verification of YAWL workflows. I have incorporated the support for both types of reduction rules into the verification functionality of the YAWL editor.

BPM simulation (2007 - 2010)

I carried out research in the area of BPM simulation as part of an ARC-Discovery project. We are interested in systematically identifying the control, the data and the resource requirements for business process simulation. This also presents collaborative efforts with researchers and students from the Eindhoven University of Technology and Macau University. We investigated how the current state data and historical data from workflow system logs could be used to enrich the input modelling aspect of a simulation study. To showcase how real-time data from the workflow system can be utilised in simulation experiments, we have developed a software that makes a link between the YAWL workflow system and the Process Mining framework (ProM). Our publications on this topic can be found on my publications page. A tutorial on how to use this feature can be found on ProM wiki.