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Towards a comprehensive understanding of the context concepts in context-aware business processes

Published: 26 June 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Recent studies explore context-awareness as a new paradigm and principle in BPM (Business Process Management). However, there is still a lack of consensus on the meaning of context related concepts in the BPM area. While most people tacitly understand what context is and use context to optimize business processes, they find it hard to define. Researchers commonly provide their own definitions according to their own background and expertise, which leads to diversity and inconsistency.
Hence, this paper provides a comprehensive understanding of the context concepts of context-aware BPM based on an extensive literature review. We excessively review and analyze existing definitions of the context concept, and propose a pyramid model to depict the trade-off between generalization and specification. Definitions of context-aware business processes have been derived from various perspectives of how a business process can potentially benefit from being aware of its context, which can be broadly classified to three categories including process flexibility, personalized services and knowledge-intensive tasks. Then we propose our definitions of the context of a business process and the context-aware business process, which can be used in general applications. In addition, context related concepts of business processes, including context-sensitive, -aware and -adaptive business processes, are clarified and distinguished to set the theoretical foundation of context-aware BPM consistently.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
S-BPM ONE '19: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Subject-Oriented Business Process Management
June 2019
118 pages
ISBN:9781450362504
DOI:10.1145/3329007
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 26 June 2019

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  1. context-aware business process
  2. context-awareness
  3. the context concept
  4. the context of a business process

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S-BPM ONE'19
S-BPM ONE'19: S-BPM ONE 2019
June 26 - 28, 2019
Seville, Spain

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S-BPM ONE '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 10 of 17 submissions, 59%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 28 of 54 submissions, 52%

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  • (2023)Identifying the Key Attributes in an Unlabeled Event Log for Automated Process DiscoveryIEEE Transactions on Services Computing10.1109/TSC.2023.3330175(1-8)Online publication date: 2023
  • (2023)Predictive compliance monitoring in process-aware information systemsInformation Systems10.1016/j.is.2023.102210115:COnline publication date: 1-May-2023
  • (2022)A Context-Aware Architecture for Realizing Business Process Adaptation Strategies Using Fuzzy PlanningInternational Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering10.1142/S021819402250002432:01(37-70)Online publication date: 14-Jan-2022
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  • (2022)Detecting Context-Aware Deviations in Process ExecutionsBusiness Process Management Forum10.1007/978-3-031-16171-1_12(190-206)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2022
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  • (2021)Context-Aware Process Modelling for Medicinal Product DevelopmentThe Practice of Enterprise Modeling10.1007/978-3-030-91279-6_12(168-183)Online publication date: 11-Nov-2021
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